From Burke to Kirk and Beyond...

Buried my uncle this week...

2012-01-28T15:01:00.006-05:00

He was a great man. He excelled at everything he wanted to excel in: medicine, science, painting, wine-making, fly-fishing, training dogs, and bird-hunting. He loved his wife and family. He never articulated a theological thought to me and seldom attended any kind of church, but he served God's children as a physician with a commitment rarely found in anyone's vocation I have known.

He despised phonies and liked strong and tough people, and unfortunately, most religious people he knew were weak if not phony and foolish. One of his ancestors was a Catholic who participated in some revolutionary activity in Germany. Seeking refuge in a Catholic church, he was kicked out. He moved to Switzerland and became a very reformed Protestant. My uncle was a rationalist and pragmatist who loved nature and considered medicine in the hospital and hunting in the woods to be more holy and sacramental than attending church services. He considered his impiety more sincere than the supposed piety of most religious people, and he probably was right. He lived his convictions better than I live mine.

People such as my uncle are the reason Purgatory makes sense. Purgatory is not as much a punishment as a moment of truth when one feels the light (and heat) of God's presence yet through God's love is perfected and saved. Heat, like water, will either save you or kill you. As one of my favorite Irish priests says, a man who will admit having much to reconcile unto God, "I don't just believe in Purgatory. I'm counting on it!"

I spoke yesterday to a Protestant friend who said there is no reason to mourn a death when the deceased is a Christian. I disagree. We don't know the condition of anyone's soul at death, though with some folks we know very well, we are more confident, if not very confident. I have lost four relatives in ten months: my mother, my nephew, my first cousin, and my uncle. Under the formula generally accepted by Protestant evangelicals for becoming a Christian (accepting Jesus Christ as personal savior for forgiveness of sins through Him alone and the Bible as His revelation), only one, my mother, would be considered a Christian. Does that mean we know the others are without hope of salvation? No. The state of every soul is known to God alone.

When I was an Episcopalian, most Anglican priests preached universalism, that is, God loves us so much that no one is damned. Such a teaching, while emphasizing the truth that God would have died for any one of us, ignores the many Old and New Testament scriptures about eternal judgment and damnation. The parable of the sheep and the goats is not, I believe, just a story to scare us into being good, but an eternal truth. The Catholic teaching on Purgatory, however, makes universal salvation logical, though at a price not just of Christ on the Cross, but of the prayers and sufferings of the entire communion of saints. Those of us living join in prayer with those who are raised to eternal life, united in the Son of God, to form the bridge of love by which those who are dead might be perfected and come face to face with God Almighty.

But there are other reasons to mourn. I grieve the loss of a caring person who taught me many things my parents could not. I grieve the loss of his stories and memories of growing up in central Pennsylvania, attending Princeton and Johns Hopkins, hunting, fishing, rearing children, arguing with his in-laws (my mother's family), and treating cancers, infertility, etc. He was, I realize, my closest uncle. I entrust his soul to a loving God. The humility he demonstrated in his life will not likely desert him in death. I miss him. Requiescat in pace.

Three years ago today...

2012-01-20T10:10:00.000-05:00

Barack Obama was inaugurated.I still believe that one president, even if supported by two houses of fools, cannot unravel this republic in one term, but one thing I underestimated is how much damage a president can do through executive orders and the fiat of administrative agencies.

"Can you come to Jesus without Church?"

2012-01-20T09:49:00.000-05:00

Jonathan D. Fitzgerald discusses Jefferson Bethke's viral video on YouTube, "Love Jesus-Hate Religion." I have to add that the young man's problems are not just theological but aesthetic. He chooses an aggressive and abrasive medium- the hip-hop sound- to attack something pastoral and magnificent. He is really attacking not just the Church, but anything with human hands that is tied to faith. He is trying to love the Incarnation by hating everything people do with their own hands in response to the Incarnation. Ultimately, he is headed towards Gnosticism, spiritual anarchism, and Manicheism. Whether he is there yet is not my call. Jacques Maritain and Allen Tate would have much to say. I think Flannery O'Connor already introduced us to his sort of religion in Wise Blood.

"Around the world, anti-Semitism is now mainstream."

2012-01-20T09:28:00.000-05:00

I am afraid Caroline Glick is right. When I was growing up, Holocaust deniers were mostly ex-Nazis in South America. During the Yom Kippur War in 1973, I never heard an anti-Israeli comment in my elementary school. We respected Jews in our community. Though some people resented their success and their tribal ways, I rarely heard someone claim that the world's problems were caused by a conspiracy of Jews except in sourpuss kill-joy right-wing circles.

Today, however, Glick can report:

'[W]hereas they may reject the daily calls to destroy the Jews, Westerners have increasingly internalized the basic claim that Jews deserve to be hated. Take for instance a Washington Post story last week on Egypt's decision to bar Jewish worshippers from making their annual visit to the grave of Torah sage Rabbi Yaakov Abu Hatzera. The story claimed that the Egyptians oppose Israel because of its treatment of Palestinians and because the Egyptian cross-border terror attack on Israel last August, "led to the killing of at least five Egyptian border guards as Israeli troops pursued alleged militants." 'That is, according to the Washington Post, just as the pan-Arab media claims, Israel is entirely responsible for Arab hatred of Jews.'

To dehumanize the children of Abraham is to dehumanize humanity.

"The Law School Bubble: How Long Will It Last If Law Grads Can’t Pay Bills?"

2012-01-16T14:36:00.004-05:00

I have been critical of the American Bar Association, namely its propensity to promote the federal and international jurisdictions at the expense of local communities. Here, however, the ABA is saying about our law schools: "Houston, we have a problem."

Just as the Catholic Church's crises are precipitated by problems in the priesthood, problems in the profession of law inevitably infect much of American culture. Overspecialized, indebted, atomistic, utilitarian analysts having no grounding in natural law are not a strong force to protect the weak from oppressors, prosecutors, debt collectors, government regulators, or litigious individuals. Without young independent lawyers, i.e., lawyers free of anchor-chain debt now common, it is much harder to protect citizens from stupid and corrupted legislation, untempered agencies, grasping executives, and capricious courts.

We would do better to have a year of law school followed by one-year apprenticeships in public agencies, courts, and private practice and completed by one semester of advanced academic studies and a final semester of mentored lawyering with a specific purpose. Of course, to do these things would benefit the students and public at the expense of the tenured law faculties and the behemoth universities. Billions of dollars have been invested under the assumption that increasing enrollments of law students borrowing more than $100,000 each would pay the bills. As the article says, what cannot go on- won't.

"Memo to Irving Babbitt" by John Abbot Clark

2012-01-16T14:26:00.003-05:00

Babbitt, for those uninitiated, was one of the great culture and literary critics before and after the Great War. His criticisms of American universities, schools, arts, music, and spending priorities have not diminished in wisdom since he died almost eighty years ago.

An excerpt from Clark's Memo:

'You staunchly opposed, with calm, critical incisiveness, the fallacies of so-called Progressive Education. Today, it has become quite fashionable to go around muttering that our elementary and secondary schools are prepared to do just about anything for our children except provide them with a basic education—a solid grounding in English, mathematics, history, science, and foreign languages. You courageously fought Dr. Eliot’s elective system, and chided college presidents—many of whom even in your day were quite obviously afflicted with edifice complexes—for being far more interested in making their institutions bigger rather than better, and in raising money rather than standards. We, at long last and in large numbers, have begun to worry about our huge state-supported universities, which are fast becoming educational bazaars by day and country clubs by night.'

Hating religion... Good luck!

2012-01-14T01:30:00.014-05:00

The video on Elizabeth Esther's link is all over Facebook. Her post refutes the worst of the video, and another post at Patheos also addresses much of the video's substance. The rapper in the video says he loves Jesus and hates religion. He actually hates what he thinks religion is, that is, empty ritual devoid of a relationship with our Holy Trinitarian God, creator of the universe.

God seeks man because the nature of God himself is to be man. Man seeks God through acts of piety, gratitude, charity, and obedience because man's very nature is to seek God his creator and brother. Jesus said, "If you love me, you will obey my commandments."

Is our love for God and striving to obey his commandments something to be hated? Jesus himself fasted for forty days and told the apostles that some evil spirits can only be cast out through prayer and fasting. Is it vanity to fast as Jesus did and taught?

Jesus said, "This is my body." Is it superfluous to go to Mass to receive the Body of Christ? Jesus forgave the sins of the paralytic and restored Peter in John 21 after Peter had denied Him. Is it vanity to confess our sins to priests ordained under the apostolic succession of St. Peter?

Jesus said, "When you did it to the least of my brethren, you did it unto me." Is it vanity to lose sleep and give up treasures on earth to feed the poor? Jesus gave us impossible tasks, yet we are called to obey and rest in His love, not succeed and rest in our success. Catholics know this truth as well as Protestants, and in many cases, they know it much better, yet somehow, when we put our hands to charity we are accused of trying to work our way to heaven without a bit of trust in God's grace.

You cannot hate true religion because the very nature of man as God's child and brother is to strive, fast, pray, give, and sacrifice to identify with Christ- not because we believe that we can obtain His love and holiness by our striving, but because we cannot imagine a living relationship with Jesus our savior in which He does all the giving and sacrifice. We do not pretend we can "even" the balance sheet with God Almighty. I buy my earthly father gifts not to even the ledger but to enrich a love that keeps multiplying. The same is true with our heavenly Father. As Mother Teresa said, we need to be "something beautiful for God."

Finally, I have heard people my whole life claim that the Church and its parishes and monasteries should sell off their treasures to feed the poor, but it is seldom the poor who say this. The first person to say this was Judas, who did not, to say the least, understand the big picture and was stealing from the collection plate. His challenge to Christ was not a Christian precedent. Others who say this are secularists who cannot see the Church in its mystical glory but only in its material functions. A third group are rich people who have beautiful things and care little about the beautiful treasures in the Church because they belong to others, including the poor, the saints, God, and others they do not know or understand. And yes, there are some well-meaning people who say this, but they never polled the poor and asked them what they thought about this lousy idea.

The poor, especially the poor in spirit, love the beautiful things in God's house. The poor do not own many beautiful things and appreciate how collectively, and with their ancestors in the communion of saints, they can enjoy beautiful things in God's house as they worship the One who redeems them. They understand that those who would sell those treasures care nothing about the patrimony of the Church which allows the poorest of the poor to worship God in splendor, glory, and beauty and to be Christ. It is the rich who say, "Sell it," but it is the poor that say no.

Another link here re the poor and Church beauty.

2012 is good so far...

2012-01-10T00:42:00.003-05:00

Alabama 21, Louisiana State 0. When it comes to college football, I'm less of a Kirkian. Russell Kirk detested all corruptions in the universities, and as a young professor at Michigan State he had watched the football tail wag the dog in the 1950s. As for me, college football will always have a romance to it, despite the fact that it turns universities upside down. It you think that's stupid, think of all those people finding a quasi-religious experience at a political convention next summer. My fever generally lasts a few hours, and I know the world seldom changes over any sporting event- except for the daily fact that young people who are striving in athletic endeavors have less time to be anarchists.

Happy New Year! Make it a year of romance...

2012-01-01T19:12:00.004-05:00

Fr. Dwight Longenecker:

'What I mean by the romance of religion is not the sentimental meaning of romance--all chocolates and candles and heaving bosoms--instead I use the word 'romance' to refer to the great romances--those stories of heroes and quests and slaying of dragons and rescuing of fair damsels. To embark on this sort of romance is to step out of boat and walk on the waves. It is to take the step of faith, the leap into the unknown. It is to "cast all your care upon Him." and walk once again by faith and not by sight.'

Read the whole thing.

A year of slow blogging...

2012-01-01T18:46:00.004-05:00

I do not blog as much as I used to. I have prayed about it in recent weeks, wondering whether I needed to carve out more time for it. The answer, at least for now, appears to be no.

When I lived out of state, this blog was a way for me to share with my father what I was reading and thinking. I never thought of my father as a "target audience," but we talked about the blog often. He also logged on to this blog in order to link on to his favorite bloggers, Fr. Dwight Longenecker at Standing on My Head, Jennifer Fulwiler at Conversion Diary, and Pentimento. Now that Dad and I live only a few miles apart, I seldom read a piece on the web, mark it, and write it up on the blog the same day.

The Spirit is moving. Please pray for my vocation as writer, father, husband, son, brother, uncle, guardian, lawyer, teacher, and Catholic layman. Love God. Love your neighbor. To paraphrase St. Francis Assisi, "if necessary, blog."

Theotokos

2012-01-01T18:37:00.006-05:00

We attended Mass this morning with my father at St. Peter's. Fr. Thomas Kelly said that we cannot fathom the holiness of the Mother of God, who was one with Christ and touched him every day. Nor can we fathom the faith of Mary, who loved her Son and embraced Him fully even when His actions and destiny were not apparent.

"Mother of God" is the free translation of theotokos. The literal translation is more like "the one who gives birth to the one who is God."

"Are We Alone in the Universe?"

2012-01-01T18:11:00.004-05:00

Charles Krauthammer discusses the discovery of more "Goldilocks" planets relatively closeby. They need to be not too warm, not too cold, not too big, and not too small in order to have any chance to have life similar to the life on ours.

"The Death of Pretty"

2011-12-29T23:09:00.006-05:00

Not a pretty trend in my lifetime. From Natalie Wood to Kim Kardashian.

"Spiritual Lullaby"

2011-12-25T01:30:00.001-05:00

Pentimento says Merry Christmas and more.

May you have many "Oh wow!" days...

2011-12-25T01:16:00.003-05:00

Peggy Noonan writes:

'I thought of a story told by a friend, whose grown son had died, at home, in a hospice. The family was ringed around his bed. As Robert breathed his last an infant in the room let out a great baby laugh as if he saw something joyous, wonderful, and gestured toward the area above Robert's head. The infant's mother, startled, moved to shush him but my friend, her mother, said no, maybe he's just reacting to . . . something only babies see.'

What did the baby see? We don't know. But we do know that babies are amazing. The Feast of the Incarnation is upon us.

Merry Christmas Everyone!

2011-12-24T09:39:00.004-05:00

2 For, behold, the darkness shall cover the earth, and gross darkness the people: but the LORD shall arise upon thee, and his glory shall be seen upon thee.
3 And the Gentiles shall come to thy light, and kings to the brightness of thy rising.

Isaiah 60:2-3.

Isaiah got to see things rarely revealed and to write them down for us. G.F. Handel was given the gift of putting Isaiah and other biblical writers to music in his Sacred Oratorio. I once sang in a community chorus that performed The Messiah every year. This performance reminds me of those good days of volunteer musicians and singers working overtime during the holidays to make something beautiful for God.

Jesus, like His saints, comes to us when we have almost come to the conclusion that He does not exist or does not care. This year I celebrate the Feast of the Nativity without the woman who gave me my own. She is not here to sing, so here is Kathleen Battle and Christopher Parkening singing the Bach/Gounod "Ave Maria."

Merry Christmas to everyone!

Why was Freddie Mac assigned my new mortgage?

2011-12-18T18:13:00.004-05:00

This year, to say the least, has been difficult, and during September I learned that in order to obtain a home loan I would have to prove that I didn't need the money. I paid off most of my debts. I liquidated assets in order in order to make a 30% down payment. The loan originator was Superior Bank. Superior Bank, after questioning every jot and tittle of my financial statements, assigned my mortgage to Wells Fargo, a total foreigner in these parts which bought out Wachovia in 2007, which had bought out SouthTrust earlier in the decade. I just received notice that Wells Fargo assigned my mortgage to Freddie Mac, which will retain Wells Fargo as its servicing agent. My payments go to Wells Fargo, but Freddie Mac owns the payments.

What is going on here? A bank recently seized by the FDIC originated my loan. Its people are aggressively trying to build business in Alabama. Superior Bank sells the mortage to a conglomerate which bought what was once an aggressive bank. Wells Fargo sells a perfectly good mortgage to a private corporation which pretends to be a government agency that regulates and enhances the mortgage industry. In reality, Freddie Mac was a very profitable corporation enjoying vast financial guarantees from its many friends in Washington, most notably, Chris Dodd, Barney Frank, and Newt Gingrich.

Why should you taxpayers be perhaps on the hook for my mortgage? Why should my mortgage be serviced by a conglomerate which gladly assigned it to Freddie Mac? Why would Freddie Mac want my mortgage except to appeal to Congress that its portfolio contains at least a few loans in which the borrower has more than a reasonable chance of paying it back? What does Wells Fargo get out of it? What does Freddie Mac get out of it?

I myself would like to think I am not enabling crony capitalists, but it seems that the mortgage industry has been taken over by the biggest players. I say: (1) abolish Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac; (2) prohibit the FDIC from insuring the deposits of any bank which has more than $100 billion in assets. "Too big to fail" means "to big not to be a nest of crony capitalists."

More on Mr. Gingrich and his $1.6 million in compensation from Freddie Mac here. I hope that Mr. Gingrich and Mitt Romney beat each other to a pulp in the next thirty days in order to make room for a candidate that is truly conservative, not a flip-flopper, and can control the right without being controlled by the right. I pray that the Republicans nominate a candidate who has the respect of conservatives yet can impress independents as a viable alternative to the Chicago way.

Christopher Hitchens is dying...

2011-12-09T18:53:00.003-05:00

I have always loved Hitchens for his candor and wit. Because he has been a very outspoken atheist, I have long suspected that he both feared and hoped God might actually care about this vale of tears. Interesting thoughts by Mark Judge:

'Ironically, there is a kind of symmetry between Hitchens and his declared enemy, Mother Teresa, whom Hitchens wrote a nasty book about and called a fanatic and a fraud (yawn). In her 2009 book Come Be My Light, published posthumously... Mother Teresa writes of long periods, indeed years, of “darkness” and suffering, during which she felt that God wasn’t there. After the book was published, Hitchens went on TV to gloat. Even Mother Teresa didn’t believe it! In fact, Mother Teresa was going through what many saints do, a dark night of the soul. Such things can make us doubt God, and that is anything but an unholy thing. As Chesterton noted, Christianity is the only religion that allows God to be an atheist (“Why have you forsaken me?”).'

"But this is a walk on the wild side."

2011-12-08T21:36:00.003-05:00

This is Peggy Noonan's last line in her column about Newt Gingrich. Here is the paragraph tailor-made for this blog:

'Do you want evidence he's a Burkean conservative? Start with welfare reform in 1996. A sober, standard Republican? Go to the balanced budgets of the Clinton era. Is he a Tea Partier? Sure, he speaks the slashing lingo with relish. Is he moderate? Yes, that can be proved. Michele Bachmann this week called him a "frugal socialist," and there's plenty of evidence of that, too.'

The column is worth the read. I'll just say having lived in Georgia during a major part of his elected political career that I have known of only two people who exceeded Newt as political animals: George Wallace and Bill Clinton.

The City of God

2011-12-07T03:43:00.004-05:00

Pentimento, if you read her blog, is a city girl through and through. Her writing can no more be divorced from NYC than Eudora Welty's could be extracted from Jackson, Mississippi.

When I read her many posts on NYC, I realize she has something I lack utterly: a vision of a City of God. My vision of God is pastoral, quaint, and intimate- more like Psalm 23. I admit that I can scarcely imagine God ruling over a huge urban area with justice, order, and liberty, where millions of people enjoy city amenities without poverty, homelessness, cynical bureacrats, and even more cynical political machines and crony capitalists. But the "New Jerusalem" is prophesied by the Old Testament prophets, Jesus himself, and St. John the Apostle, and it is not a village or farm; it is a city. It is my lack of faith that I could never imagine a city of God. Saint Augustine, pray for us.

The Tiber River- What's on the other side?

2011-12-07T02:54:00.003-05:00

This week I was trying to check on the Latin spelling of St. Matthew, so I searched for a parallel Vulgate/English Bible and found this lovely site. As I read the parallel texts, I switched over to the Gospel of St. Mark because I wanted to see the Latin text of: "Lord, I believe. Help me in my unbelief," which is credo adiuva incredulitatem meam. What is missing in the Latin is any word for Lord such as Domini. Curious, I pasted credo adiuva incredulitatem meam into my search engine and got several hits, including this blog post at Bedlam or Parnassus. The post was so interesting I stopped at work to post a comment. I received this nice response:

Dear TQ...thank you so much for posting on my blog. I have just read your story of crossing the Tiber as well as your profile. It seems we have much in common! Anyone who can list Spinal Tap alongside Casablanca, Shawshank, the Iliad, and especially the Aeneid is my kind of guy! I think it no coincidence that our paths have crossed. In Part VII of your story, I saw the same picture of St. Augustine that the lock screen on my iPad. If you would like to chat further, drop me an email. I will list it here, but would prefer you delete this comment so it is not out there too long. You may email me at ____@_____. For a quick rundown, my wife and I celebrated 20 years of marriage this summer. We have two children, and I have been a Latin teacher at middle school, high school, community college, and undergraduate levels for 20 years. A lifelong evangelical, I have been prayerfully considering the Tiber swim for several years.
Magister Christianus

This is the extent of our correspondence so far, but it is just the type of exchange I hoped to have when we first connected to the internet in 1997. Two men who blog anonymously, who love to read and appreciate ancient books and sacramental mysteries somehow connect electronically. Please pray for my new friend Magister Christianus.

"When We Remembered Zion"

2011-11-26T02:02:00.003-05:00

Pentimento loves New York. It is a longing for home worthy for a poet or songwriter:

'The city is itself a massive safety valve; no matter how cramped your quarters, you can leave them at any time and actually go somewhere else and still return home in ten minutes. The teeming, rushing life all around buoys the spirits; aesthetic pleasures of all kinds abound. One can have myriads of secret lives there -- I don't mean affairs or other insidious secrets, but, rather, tiny, mundane ones: favorite places, favorite trees on favorite streets, favorite cups of coffee at favorite diners. It seems to me that in small towns, or in the suburbs, one has fewer means of release, fewer tiny secrets to maintain, and one is therefore much more exposed.'

I had to post a comment about Southern suburbia. I look forward to meeting my blogging friends in NYC one day.

Retirement of Cardinal Law

2011-11-25T10:24:00.012-05:00

Bernard Cardinal Law resigned as Archbishop of Boston several years ago and was kicked upstairs to Rome. He recently retired from his Roman post. Cardinal Law was the bishop in charge when the whole archdiocese imploded in sex scandal, but he followed a long line of bishops who seemed incapable of addressing pederasty among the clergy.

Cardinal Law was, according to people who knew him well, a decent man, not especially charismatic, but concerned for justice. Many Church leaders over five decades admitted neither the sickness among their own priests nor their own unwillingness to protect children. A frightful stubbornness kicked in. As I teach my daughter through J.R.R. Tolkien's characters, few people set out to do wicked things, but as with Gollum, sin eventually hinders us from doing the right things if we do not address it with humility and contrition. Like Gollum, we can become monsters.

As a Catholic familiar with political persecutions of bishops and priests in history, I could understand if the bishops had taken the wayward priests out of public ministry and not told the police, but they did not even do that. They refused to address repeated mortal sin in their own and allowed that mortal sin to destroy the lives of the faithful. The bishops in Boston, as in other places, were largely immigrants and children of immigrants who had "made it" in America, and their pride made it almost impossible to admit dangerous, ongoing mortal sins by the clergy on their watch. It does not surprise me that Boston, a city where the Catholics' distaste for the WASP is often palpable to this day, became the place where the Church could not own up to its own scandal. But sometimes, as in here, God can speak and work through The Boston Globe.

Cardinal Law is an old man. Though many want to see him in irons, that is not likely to happen. He is more likely to retire to a religious community outside the United States and be buried in a cemetery for priests and religious. If you read Dante, there are special places in The Inferno for bad priests and bishops, but thinking about Hell and wishing it for anyone risks your soul more than that of the one you despise. This blog's theme holds true:

"How small of all that human hearts endure
That part which laws or kings can cause or cure."

As Jesus said, some demons can only be cast out by prayer and fasting. Saint Anthony the Hermit, pray for us.

"Branding" is for bulls.

2011-11-24T09:36:00.017-05:00

A "brand" in modern parlance is a person, product, or line of products whose usefulness and/or suaveness is imprinted in the minds of consumers. As I explored setting up my own law practice, I found the web to be full of marketing consultants, some very good but most underemployed, who tell me that I must create my own "brand" as a lawyer. I know what they are saying, and I do not believe they mean harm. Nonetheless, the constant promotion of style and image over substance is what is wrong with the world.

I was introduced to Benetton twenty years ago. I received two pretty sweaters as a Christmas gift. They were colorful and had the label "United Colors of Benetton." I liked to wear them and received compliments whenever I did. Their "branding" I soon learned, however, was despicable, though they always claimed to be fighting for love and its modern twin, tolerance. They caught every politically-correct wind and threw sexual controversies into clothing ads as if no children were ever watching. I never purchased another Benetton product.

Most recently, their mocking of world leaders through the photo-shopped "kissing" images of the "UNHATE" campaign shows the truly discordant and incoherent colors of Benetton. Nobody has tried to reach out to Muslims and discuss faith and religious tolerance more than Pope Benedict XVI, yet there he is pictured, kissing Sheikh Ahmed Mohamed El-Tayeb. Below the men are the words "UNHATE," as if a big smooch among men would keep young Muslims from blowing themselves up along with the Coptic Christians. Benetton's brand is "trendy shock" masquerading as moral vision. It is really politically-correct sanctimoniousness.

Penn State had a great brand until two weeks ago. The association of Penn State with "Joe Pa," excellence, "Happy Valley," and clean football is now broken with the images of Jerry Sandusky in handcuffs and his lawyer trying to explain away a scathing indictment and more reports of pederasty. Nobody protected the Penn State brand as zealously as Graham Spanier, who, until two weeks ago was considered an outstanding university president. It appears that he carried a shovel and broom wherever he went in order to bury the bones and sweep away the rumors at the school and thereby protect the "brand."

The Irish diaspora produced a unique American ethnicity, even a "brand," the Boston Irishmen. Through political machines, trade unions, the public schools, the parochial schools, and the priests and bishops, they overthrew the Brahmins and WASPs and ran the city of Boston and many of its suburbs. But the Church became more concerned with its "brand" than its mission to children, and went down in scandal. If the bishops and clergy had been willing to let a priest or two face scrutiny and moral outrage for their deeds fifty years ago, they would have saved the "little ones" in their charge, set a disciplinary example for the rest, and avoided the millstones that several of them acquired about their necks.

Branding has its costs. Brands are abstractions. They have no relationships. They do not bleed. They do not make the world a better place. They simply, for a very short time, symbolize something people want and perhaps need.

Branding is one of the costs of over-specialization. Not too many people understand the medicines, machines, and investments they depend on, much less the laws they are beholden to. We depend on people whose skills we do not have time to understand. In the great unknown, a brand sometimes must suffice for reasonable certainty, e.g., good brands such as GM, AIG, Wachovia, and Lehman Brothers.

Steve Jobs had 'a theory about “why decline happens” at great companies: “The company does a great job, innovates and becomes a monopoly or close to it in some field, and then the quality of the product becomes less important. The company starts valuing the great salesman, because they’re the ones who can move the needle on revenues.” So salesmen are put in charge, and product engineers and designers feel demoted: Their efforts are no longer at the white-hot center of the company’s daily life. They “turn off.” IBM and Xerox, Jobs said, faltered in precisely this way. The salesmen who led the companies were smart and eloquent, but “they didn’t know anything about the product.” In the end this can doom a great company, because what consumers want is good products.'

After quoting Jobs, Peggy Noonan goes on to discuss how politics is where branding can hurt the most:

'America is in political decline in part because we’ve elevated salesmen—people good on the hustings and good in the room, facile creatures with good people skills—above people who love the product, which is sound and coherent government—”good government,” as they used to say. To make that product you need a certain depth of experience. You need to know the facts, the history, how the system works, what the people want, what the moment demands.'

Each party now is in the straight jacket of its own "brand." The partisans of the party of "no new taxes" and "no amnesty" cannot accept the fact that the tax code will need to be rewritten in the next few years to sustain growth and provide for entitlements; there will be winners and losers. (I myself prefer flatter rates, fewer deductions, and few if any tax credits for crony capitalists.) They cannot accept the fact that millions of loyal Americans are not legal citizens yet cannot be deported without a bitter new "trail of tears" and separation from their children who are U.S. citizens. The partisans of the party of "unions and entitlements forever" cannot accept the fact that confiscatory tax rates cannot guarantee entitlements, pensions, giveaways, and union hegemony for my lifetime, much less my daughter's.

We need creative people, producers, and innovators who are willing to sacrifice parts of our sprawling government in order to save it. Branding cannot be the substitute for either integrity or imagination. We need new leadership.

"Why Some Women Are Burning Out of Work By 30"

2011-11-23T09:19:00.003-05:00

I started law school in my mid-thirties; I was the third oldest person in my class. Most of my classmates came straight from college where they were "all-everything." As is normal today, bright women were well represented on the Law Review, on the Moot Court Board, on the other journals, and among the star interviewees for the best-known law firms in the nation. Many women graduated from Vandy Law and went on immediately to enviable positions in private practice, clerkships, government positions, and NGOs.

This article strikes a chord because I have seen it happen to dozens of my female classmates who have left law practice before our class' 10th anniversary, and often before they themselves hit 30.

Who was Hitler?

2011-11-22T21:05:00.014-05:00

We used to hear: "Bush is Hitler." Now we hear: "Obama is Hitler." Meanwhile, about one billion people living between Marrakesh and Jakarta do not believe there was a Holocaust. Are we nuts? Hitler should not be compared to Saddam Hussein or Pol Pot, much less to a U.S. president.

During the 1990s I taught a fellow who wanted to minimize the evils of Adolf Hitler. He had an older relative who was somewhat of an apologist for the Fuehrer. This kid was rare in those days; those who had fought Hitler still were present in the news media and would not let such misguided sentimentalism sneak into our public discourse. Today, weak references and comparisons to Hitler occur daily in the media and on the streets, propagated by both the right and the left.

Let's set the record straight: Hitler was responsible for the deaths of tens of millions of people. Mass extermination was his policy, method, end, and pleasure. His only competition at the top tier of evil during the last hundred years was from Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong. There were plenty of other mass murderers and rapacious dictators, but only those three, through force of personality backed by totalitarian parties, massive armies, and invasive legions of secret police, were able to order or cause the deaths of more than twenty million people over huge territories and across multiple ethnicities. Whatever evil most of us have witnessed, theirs was exponential in comparison.

Enough is enough. Hyperbole confuses. The present hyperbole comparing 21st-century U.S. presidents to the 20th century's most murderous dictator insults everyone who gave blood to defeat National Socialism and everyone who has served the last two presidents loyally and faithfully.

UPDATE: To compare anyone with Hitler is to declare him beyond the pale and therefore less than a person and unworthy of any respect. It destroys our political discourse and our own moral reasoning to compare anyone but a handful of human beings to Hitler.

Warp drive is on its way!

2011-11-22T18:58:00.002-05:00

Neutrinos appear to travel faster than light. I am excited now about my prospects of intergalactic travel... which must be just around the corner (or around the Andromeda galaxy).

"George's God: The Faith of the Quiet Beatle"

2011-11-22T18:53:00.003-05:00

Andrew Ferguson writes of George Harrison's quest for faith:

'It helps that Hinduism lets a believer off the hook more easily than Christianity. Harrison became a particular devotee of the god Krishna, a blue-skinned, flute-tooting playboy who, unlike Jesus Christ, rotates his way through a harem of thousands of nubile maidens. Compared with them, Ringo’s wife must have seemed like a trifle.

'Still, his mother may have succeeded more than he knew. When he went off with Maharishi, he wrote her a letter of reassurance. His Hindu practice, he told her, wasn’t taking him “off from any devotion to the Sacred Heart in any way. It only strengthens it!” Religious devotion of the most intimate sort preoccupied him, and his oscillation between guilt and redemption had a Catholic look to it—though his insistence on the split between spirit and body could have landed him squarely with the Manicheans.'

"Consecration to Mary"

2011-11-21T23:01:00.003-05:00

Nice post by Betty Duffy, a friend of Pentimento. An excerpt:

'If everything I do is for Jesus through Mary, my sanctity is not my problem; it's not something I can earn of my own will or by perfect performance. I'm a slave, and my intentions are now Mary's intentions, and the graces of my prayers are hers to administer. I have confidence that I also share the benefit of those graces somehow.'

"The Sheep and the Goats"

2011-11-20T20:29:00.007-05:00

The reading today, Matthew 25:31-46, is more than challenging. To embrace Christ is not just to embrace the joys of joyful people but the sorrows of sorrowful people:

44 Then they also will answer, `Lord, when did we see thee hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and did not minister to thee?'
45 Then he will answer them, `Truly, I say to you, as you did it not to one of the least of these, you did it not to me.'

Oddly enough, towards the end of the deacon's homily this morning, a fire alarm went off in the sacristy, and the priest got up reverently and turned it off. Later he said to the assembled that the deacon's "fire and brimstone preaching set off the alarm." It was funny to all because the deacon had challenged us in a most loving and gentle way.

After eating lunch with my father, we dropped him off, and as we drove home ourselves it occurred to me that I had not visited my uncle in months. As soon as I thought it, I tried to talk myself out of it, which usually happens when one gets a godly impulse. We went to see my uncle, a widower who is about ninety and legally blind. As I sat with him, I prayed that Our Lady of the Visitation which guide me of when to talk and when to shut up. I don't know how well I listened, but I tried. My wife and I agree that we ought to go more often, not to share, but to sit. The saints were never in a hurry when with those in need.

I thought about other things today in obedience to the Gospel, namely that if I give my time to God's needy children, all those professional things a lawyer is supposed to do, such as networking, Twittering, rubbing elbows with the mighty, etc. will be covered by God and the heavenly host. Ora pro nobis.

"Crime and Communion"

2011-11-19T22:56:00.002-05:00

Pentimento finds little graces in unlikely places, little graces that God give us vision to see, often through suffering.

"The Technocratic Nightmare"

2011-11-18T18:34:00.008-05:00

Modernists in Europe save special scorn for the Medieval Church, but if any group deserves to be called an arrogant priesthood, it would be the evangelists and bureaucrats of the European Union, who have been selling indulgences of less value than anything ever hawked by the stupidest cleric. David Brooks notes:

'The European Union is an attempt to build an economic and legal superstructure without a linguistic, cultural, historic and civic base. It was the final of the post-World War II efforts — the United Nations was among the first — to build governments that were transnational, passionless and safe.'

He then writes something any Kirkite could cheer:

'On a superficial level, the fault lies with the current European leadership, their addiction to inadequate patches and fudges. But the real problems emerge from the technocratic mind-set, from the arrogant gray men who believe they can engineer society, oblivious to history, language, culture, values and place.'

He concludes by making an analogy I have thought about but not yet posted upon, that is, that Europe's leadership is as clueless today as it was in 1914. In 1914, there were military alliances ready to drag an entire continent into destruction; this year it is an economic alliance in which the responsible are manipulated into supporting the debts and fiscal policies of the irresponsible.

Mike McQueary and Jerry Sandusky

2011-11-16T20:09:00.004-05:00

Mike McQueary has kept silent on advice from his attorney. But he will tell his story before this thing is over.

What is difficult, though not impossible to comprehend, is how men of real virtues of fortitude, temperance, prudence, and justice could miss the mark and fail to protect these children. We wonder, but he have seen it before.

Now you know what Purgatory is for.

2011-11-16T19:25:00.010-05:00

If the allegations against Jerry Sandusky are true and backed by believable and admissible evidence, Clarence Darrow would not be able to save him from severe punishment. He is likely to spend the rest of his life behind bars, and sex offenders are often given the worst treatment by jailers and the jailed. At the moment, he is spinning for the best jury he can hope to have.

But in the end, he is likely to go to jail. What then? He might become penitent in the penitentiary. Understandably, many of those whose lives he ruined will be angry with anything short of the death penalty.

What I am seeing and hearing, not from all but from a large number, is a sanctimoniousness that is palpable. People want vengeance and cannot imagine themselves missing the mark as McQueary apparantly did, and certainly not falling into some sort of predatory, addictive sin as Sandusky apparently did. Some folks on a radio call-in show today were smugly confident that if they had been Mike McQueary they would beaten up Sandusky and saved the children as if they were heroes in a cartoon. Unless you have experience with sexual abuse, you (and I) would likely walk away and ask: "Did I really just see what I just saw?" Most of us would keep silent rather than become a pariah in our hometown and a persona non grata in the profession of our dreams.

There is plenty of talk about jailing McQueary while cutting Sandusky open with a dull knife, but for those of us who pray for the prisoners and ask God to set them free, we pray that Sandusky (as well as his enablers) turns his face to God. Being that neither he nor we are pure and ready to rub elbows with the heavenly host, we believe that he, like the thief on the cross, will be forgiven if his contrition is true.

And in the words of a Irish priest I know who readily admits to a bitter and hateful former life as an IRA activist, "I not only believe in Purgatory, I'm counting on it."

"Do the Occupy Wall Street Protesters and America a Favor: Send Them to Rabbinical School"

2011-11-15T19:01:00.005-05:00

They might get an education better than whatever got them their degrees. Jonathan Rosenblum says:

'The great Harvard medievalist Harry Austrn Wolfson described Talmdudic study as "the application of the scientific method to the study of texts." Hypotheses are continually being formulated and either successfully defended or rejected. The Talmud says that one who studies alone grows stupid, and the battles between study partners are nothing less than the "wars of Torah." Even when one studies alone, he must act as his own study partner, constantly asking: Does my theory fit all the facts? Is there another way to explain all the relevant data?

'Students must learn to follow complex arguments that proceed over pages of texts, and to hold firm at each step as to whether and in what way the argument is being advanced or questioned. Ten-year-olds learn to apply, without being aware of it, the tables taught in mathematical logic to actual cases.'

The ability to make a moral argument is what we need more than the credentialism that prevails in our colleges.

"Why We Study Useless Things"

2011-11-15T18:47:00.003-05:00

I remember facts and details that no one remembers. Remembering stuff from long ago is what I am known for by my oldest and closest friends.

Reading history for me was never a mere pleasure, but a compulsion necessary for sanity. I am disturbed by much of the world, close and far away. Reading history is how I grapple with conflicts that cannot be resolved but cannot be left alone. Thus, I revisit them, i.e., the persistant topics of this blog.

Rev. James Schall, S.J. understands this:

'As Plato said and Aquinas practiced, we only know the truth of something when we also know the arguments against it. The whole truth includes a knowledge of what is not true. It is also the perfection of mind to know what is contrary to mind. That is why we study not just sound but also unsound philosophies, not just orthodoxy but heresies. All error is based in some truth, a truth that is worth finding for its own sake.'

"The Devil and Joe Paterno"

2011-11-15T18:38:00.003-05:00

Because I do not believe there can be "evil incarnate" (though I do believe someone can be so corrupted by evil that doing good becomes almost impossible), I cannot write off people who commit heinous and public sins as fundamentally different from those who do not. Ross Douthat writes well about those who fight so hard for the good they can become blind to the sins of others:

'Castrillón [Dario Castrillon Hoyos] is a Colombian, born in Medellín, who became a Catholic priest and then a bishop during the agony of his country’s drug-fueled civil wars. In Colombia, he was a remarkable figure: a “rustic man with the profile of an eagle,” as Gabriel García Márquez described him, who left his episcopal residence at night to feed slum children, mediated between guerrillas and death squads and reputedly made his way to Pablo Escobar’s house disguised as a milkman to demand that the drug kingpin confess his sins.

'But that isn’t how the world thinks of him today. In the 1990s, Castrillón was elevated to the College of Cardinals and placed in charge of the Vatican’s Congregation for the Clergy, where he came to embody the culture of denial that characterized Rome’s initial response to the sex abuse crisis.'

Douthat writes insightfully about a man of real virtue can "miss the mark."

"The Narrative of Perpetual Palestinian Victimhood"

2011-11-15T09:07:00.003-05:00

I have written about self-pity being one of the worst sins, for by it one can rationalize any misbehavior. National or cultural self-pity often leads to fascism masquerading as some sort of liberation movement. Shelby Steele writes a great piece on the Palestinians' problem, which is not Israel and colonialism but the end of colonialism and excuses for being backward. The end of the excuse is sometimes more painful than the former oppression and leads to well-educated professional victims.

11th Hour of the 11th Day

2011-11-11T13:55:00.005-05:00

Thank you! Here is the old link to the photo.

Great post and links by the Anchoress.

"Brave New Transnational Progressive World"

2011-11-11T13:27:00.004-05:00

I write sporadically on international law, which unfortunately seems to interest mostly those who have a quasi-religious faith in it. If international law is based upon natural law, that is, the belief that laws can modify human behavior but seldom if ever change human nature, it is healthy. Unfortunately today, international law is based upon the abstractions of the French Revolution rather than on the natural law tradition or the chartered rights of sovereign nations.

Indeed, the very purpose of international law since the Second World War has been to undermine national sovereignty in both theory and practice. What you get, Exhibit 1A being the European Union, is a centralized bureaucracy which tramples local governance and customs with the bludgeon of "international human rights." Just as Wm. F. Buckley, Jr. said he'd rather be governed by the first five hundred names in the Boston telephone directory than by the Harvard faculty, I'd rather be governed by unlettered local yokels who would answer my phone calls than by brilliant but invisible and unreachable bureaucrats answerable only to themselves.

Clifford D. May notes:

'Transnationals are not so much anti-democratic as post-democratic. They believe that in the 21st century, democracy should be updated to imply the enforcement of "universal principles of human rights" that they, of course, will enumerate and define. They talk not of surrendering sovereignty but of "sharing" it "collectively." The result, they assert, will be a new age of "global authority" that will produce "global justice" under "global rule of law."

'Indeed, since the end of the Cold War transnational progressives have been establishing international laws -- really supranational laws -- that no voters can repeal or even amend. One way they accomplish this: A treaty is drafted. International pressure is applied to get the U.S. president's signature and the U.S. Senate's ratification. Judges — often from undemocratic countries — in transnational courts then interpret the treaty to mean whatever they want it to mean. There are no courts of appeal.

'And if the U.S. rejects the treaty or agrees to only parts of it by issuing "reservations," the transnationals declare that that the U.S. is bound nonetheless — under what they call "customary international law" to which, they further insist, even the U.S. Constitution is "subordinate."

'It is on this basis that the argument is made that the U.S. is violating the Geneva Accords by declining to classify al-Qaeda terrorists as Prisoners of War — despite the fact that the U.S. has never agreed that unlawful combatants are entitled to such honorable status.'

The dirty little secret is if the last democracy in the world that does not care about international opinion, Israel, can be discredited and even disarmed by "international law," then the same precedents can be applied to the USA (which does care at least a tad about international opinion). Resisting the jihadis will make us a "rogue nation," just as Israel is called "fascist" by real fascists.

"Growing Up Penn State"

2011-11-10T12:58:00.005-05:00

Michael Weinreb has written the best article on Joe Paterno I have seen this week. He expresses my feelings closely. I lived in State College for a few months right after I finished college. I have always admired Joe Pa.

Without knowing all the facts, I imagine that Joe Pa could not imagine his close friend being a pervert, so he chose to send the issue upstairs. However, nobody in the administration at Penn State was going to go after Joe Pa's right-hand man unless Joe Pa's gave the green light. Jerry Sandusky retired, the local DA did not have enough evidence to prosecute, and the matter was buried until now. Cover-ups are always worse than the initial crime.

But as at least one critic has said, Joe Pa would not have looked the other way if it had been one of his one grandchildren being assaulted. I am sad. Even depressed.

Dorothy Thompson and Rebecca West

2011-11-10T09:22:00.003-05:00

They were married to, respectively, Sinclair Lewis and H.G. Wells. They were writers in their own right, and they saw how 1914 had unleashed our current times of troubles:

'What was very much within their powers was the capacity to perceive how the cultural and social rebellions that swept through Europe and America after World War I had unleashed forces of darkness. As the Berlin bureau chief for the New York Post, Thompson became the first foreign journalist to interview Adolf Hitler—in 1931, two years before his rise to power. She immediately saw the existential evil lurking behind his dream of a greater Germany. The sight of a Hitler Youth camp where young boys gathered under a banner that read "You Were Born to Die for Germany" horrified her. Nazism was, she said, "a complete break with Reason, with humanity, and Christian ethics that are at the basis of liberalism and democracy."'

More here.

Too much scrutiny... too little understanding of human frailty

2011-11-09T18:16:00.003-05:00

No sport is more built on public and private video analysis than NFL football, which has a squad of analysts at every game and keeps the world's largest video library, both to promote itself and to give fans the closest and best view of the "game of inches." The "All 22" view, however, the NFL does not distribute, that is, the high camera that catches the movements of all 22 players on each play.

'Lonnie Marts, a former linebacker for the Jacksonville Jaguars, says there are thousands of former NFL players who could easily pick apart play-calling and player performance if they had access to this film. "If you knew the game, you'd know that sometimes there's a lot of bonehead plays and bonehead coaching going on out there," he says.'

But that is true for all of life, and the unrealistic expectations of competence in almost any field are soon dashed when one becomes familiar with the actual practice of any profession, skill, art, or craft. Failure is normal. But everywhere you turn, you find people hunting for "people to hold accountable," even for lost bets. In many cases, such as covered-up sexual abuse, there is at least one culprit, but in the failure of large organizations to excel in difficult things, you can fire the coach or shoot him, but the degree of difficulty does not change. I myself find the endless analysis of modern sports broadcasting to be boring and prefer the entertaining narratives of days gone by. We are technically competent but morally illiterate.

More here about "The Footage the NFL Won't Show You."

President Obama's commitment to Israel

2011-11-09T18:10:00.003-05:00

He is struggling to hide the lack of it.

Ronald Reagan's Eureka College to celebrate fall of the Berlin Wall

2011-11-09T18:01:00.004-05:00

Looking at the Berlin Wall was a transformative experience for me in 1984 and more disturbing than my visit to Dachau, because the Berlin Wall was not a museum, but an existing prison for millions outside, not inside. I have never since been surrounded by armed tyranny. The German government donated a section of the Wall to Eureka College in Illinois, in thanksgiving for President Reagan's work in fighting communism.

"Children, Rats, and Mazes"

2011-11-07T15:40:00.003-05:00

John Rosemond:

'As a graduate student in psychology, I had trained a rat to run a maze. Indeed, it was simple. At the same time, I was struggling to discipline our first child, then a toddler. That wasn't simple at all. Ignoring his misbehavior didn't work. Neither did punishing him; nor did rewarding him when he behaved properly. In fact, the more I tried to discipline him using behavior modification-based methods, the worse his behavior became.'

I always thought the Skinnerians were arrogant nuts. Man is capable of knowledgeable and deliberate actions against his self-interests. The dumbest dog does not do that.

"Happy Days Aren't Here Again"

2011-11-07T13:36:00.004-05:00

Rupert Murdoch has allowed me to view Peggy Noonan's Friday column without a subscription now, and it is a good one about the challenge the Republicans have of defeating a Democratic incumbant:

'And there’s still a certain lingering mystique to the Democratic Party. It retains a vestigial reputation for a kind of glamour, sophistication and broadness. Isn’t that Averell Harriman over there with Chip Bohlen? There’s Babe and Bill, Jack and Jackie. There was an ethos of easily worn wealth joined to a spirit of declared egalitarianism. The guy standing with Averell, the rough-featured labor leader with hands like shovels: It’s Dave Dubinsky of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union. The Democratic Party in its best days was hard hat and top hat, a party of the little guy run by the most interesting and glamorous big guys.'

Not that this is reality, but it is what the Republicans must run against. I never bought it, but my Southern grandparents voted for Alf Landon in 1936.

"Why Wall Street Can't Handle the Truth"

2011-11-07T13:27:00.004-05:00

Looking at the excerpt from Mike Mayo's book, Exile on Wall Street, it appears that Wall Street analysts, especially those that cover the financial sector, are often in bed with the corporations and institutions they analyze:

'The proportion of sell ratings on Wall Street remains under 5%, even today, despite the fact that any first-year MBA student can tell you that 95% of the stocks cannot be winners.

'Over the years, I have pointed out certain problems in the banking sector—things like excessive risk, outsized compensation for bankers, more aggressive lending—and as a result been yelled at, conspicuously ignored, threatened with legal action and mocked by banking executives, all with the intent of persuading me to soften my stance.

'Looking inside the world of finance—with its pressures to conform and stay quiet—may offer some insight into why so many others have fudged. And it may offer some answers as to how crisis after crisis has hit the economy over the past decade, taking the markets by surprise, despite what should have been plentiful warning signs.'

"The Big College Scam"

2011-11-06T20:15:00.003-05:00

I am grateful for my college education and both of my stints in grad school, but it could be so much better with the resources available. Jack Kelly discusses some of the reasons why. In "Schoolkids Need an Education Lobbyist", Brian Calle notes that education itself is a self-interested industry and ought to be looked upon as such.

I learned when I was at Vanderbilt that senior administrators spent fortunes in Washington chasing the federal dollar. The "military-industrial complex" has given birth to federally-subsidized research in areas that few Congressmen, much less taxpayers, would approve, if they bothered to read the appropriations bills. The real racket is that the university presidents ask for and receive raises in the maximum loans a student can receive and then raise tuition accordingly. The quality of instruction, research, or writing has certainly not improved in the universities during my lifetime, but the quantity has!

"Buckley, If Not God, Returns to Yale"

2011-11-06T20:06:00.003-05:00

A funny piece by Neal B. Freeman, who attended Yale and knew Wm. F. Buckley, Jr. well. An little excerpt from his speech:

'The joy that Bill Buckley brought to any room lingered long after his departure. Years after the event, I obtained excerpts of Bill's interview with the FBI on the occasion of my appointment to a federal position. At the end of such field investigations, the agent typically asks an omnibus, fanny-covering question: Would I, candidate Freeman, be likely to embarrass the administration? Replied witness Buckley, under oath: "I should think that the reverse is much more likely."'

"One Man Against Tyranny"

2011-11-04T12:35:00.003-04:00

Georg Elser came as close as anyone to killing Adolf Hitler. The story of how he did it on November 8, 1939 is worth the read.

The article raises all kinds of moral issues: At what point is assassination an act of self-defense? Was the bombing of a beer hall an act of terrorism?

Herr Elser himself is an enigma: a simple Protestant who said the Lord's Prayer each day but became a member of a Communist group and voted for the Communists for many years. Tuesday is the 72nd anniversary of the assassination attempt.

Give me liberty or give me... multiculturalism.

2011-11-04T09:15:00.004-04:00

You cannot be American without being multicultural if for no other reason, you cannot eat, obtain goods, improve your house, or get vital services without working with people of different ethnicities. My former parish in Georgia is as multicultural as a UNICEF "holiday" card. But "multiculturalism," that's not something I can believe in.

As currently taught and theorized, multiculturalism is a repudiation of our chartered liberties and rights as Americans in favor of abstract egalitarian ideas about the human person. No thanks. I'll take the Judeo-Christian understanding of the human person combined with the established traditional rights of Englishmen and the long-practiced constitutional liberties of Americans over any of the abstractions of Rousseau and the French Revolution. More from Max Flax.

"As Federal Crime Grows, Threshold of Guilt Declines"

2011-11-04T09:04:00.004-04:00

This might be the biggest issue of American liberty today. The U.S. Congress passes laws that create criminal liability without criminal intent. I'll put it bluntly: This is an unfortunate change in our laws. Once upon a time, there were only a handful of federal laws, and most of them had to do with tariffs, customs, excises, and foreign trade. The small number of federal crimes required mens rea, that is, criminal intent, for conviction.

We are now undoing several centuries of Anglo-American law. One can go to jail for honest mistakes. We are making criminal remedies for things which should have civil remedies. We are giving regulatory agencies power to ruin the lives of citizens under procedures that offer only a remote chance of a jury trial.

The religions of Obama and Cain

2011-11-04T08:53:00.004-04:00

Harry Jackson:

'Mr. Cain's church subscribes to traditional Christian theology, which sees the black experience in light of scripture. Mr. Obama's former pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, on the other hand, is known for teaching black liberation theology, which sees scripture in light of the black experience. It seeks to create a direct correlation between the black condition and the light of God's revelation in Jesus Christ. The freedom they gained from whites is a part of the freedom Jesus promised.

'According to Antioch's website, its early leaders "stressed the dignity of work and honest labor." By contrast, Trinity's website emphasizes God's displeasure with "America's economic mal-distribution." It's not surprising, then, that President Obama would see a government-run jobs program as the key to ending the current economic recession whereas Mr. Cain would look to private industry.'

An informative piece. Read the whole thing. Religion matters very much in politics because everyone has a religion, and that religion informs the conscience and that person's beliefs about right and wrong, war and peace, and freedom and justice.

OWS, the Recession, and Fannie Mae

2011-11-04T08:37:00.003-04:00

Peggy Noonan expressed my thoughts exactly:

Occupy Wall Street makes an economic critique that echoes the president's, though more bluntly: the rich are bad, down with the elites. It's all ad hoc, more poetry slam than platform. Too bad it's not serious in its substance.

There's a lot to rebel against, to want to throw off. If they want to make a serious economic and political critique, they should make the one Gretchen Morgenson and Joshua Rosner make in Reckless Endangerment: that real elites in Washington rigged the system for themselves and their friends, became rich and powerful, caused the great cratering, and then "slipped quietly from the scene."

It is a blow-by-blow recounting of how politicians—Democrats and Republicans—passed the laws that encouraged the banks to make the loans that would never be repaid, and that would result in your lost job. Specifically it is the story of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the mortgage insurers, and how their politically connected CEOs, especially Fannie's Franklin Raines and James Johnson, took actions that tanked the American economy and walked away rich. It began in the early 1990s, in the Clinton administration, and continued under the Bush administration, with the help of an entrenched Congress that wanted only two things: to receive campaign contributions and to be re-elected.

The story is a scandal, and the book should be the bible of Occupy Wall Street. But they seem as incapable of seeing government as part of the problem as Republicans seem of seeing business as part of the problem.

"All the Single Ladies"- Post No. 3600 since November 2005

2011-11-03T23:00:00.005-04:00

I'm blogging in the 13th century trying to catch up to the 21st, but what's new! I am reading right now about 16th-century Dominicans, and their problems were just as bad as ours, if not worse.

I have several articles to post, but no time to comment on them in a meaningful way. "All the Single Ladies" in The Atlantic was the most disturbing article I've read in a while. Kate Bolick examines the casualties of the sexual revolution and concludes it was worth it, even as she writes passages such as this one:

'One of Walsh’s pet observations pertains to what she calls the “soft harem,” where high-status men (i.e., the football captain) maintain an “official” girlfriend as well as a rotating roster of neo-concubines, who service him in the barroom bathroom or wherever the beer is flowing. “There used to be more assortative mating,” she explained, “where a five would date a five. But now every woman who is a six and above wants the hottest guy on campus, and she can have him—for one night.”'

Ms. Bolick continues a paragraph later about a group of women in their early twenties, all college graduates:

'Most striking to me was the innocence of these young women. Of these attractive and vivacious females, only two had ever had a “real” boyfriend—as in, a mutually exclusive and satisfying relationship rather than a series of hookups—and for all their technical know-how, they didn’t seem to be any wiser than I’d been at their age. This surprised me; I’d assumed that growing up in a jungle would give them a more matter-of-fact or at least less conventional worldview. Instead, when I asked if they wanted to get married when they grew up, and if so, at what age, to a one they answered “yes” and “27 or 28.”

'“That’s only five or six years from now,” I pointed out. “Doesn’t that seem—not far off?” They nodded.

'“Take a look at me,” I said. “I’ve never been married, and I have no idea if I ever will be. There’s a good chance that this will be your reality, too. Does that freak you out?” Again they nodded.

'“I don’t think I can bear doing this for that long!” whispered one, with undisguised alarm.'

"Innocent" is the wrong word. "Disengaged" and perhaps "systematically rejected" would be better. Marriage for many has been replaced by a strange form of bourgeois concubinage. I think the Greek warriors in The Iliad loved their captive wives more.

"Conformity for Diversity's Sake"

2011-11-03T22:57:00.003-04:00

George Will writes about my last school, Vanderbilt University.

Obama and Catholics

2011-10-15T10:10:00.006-04:00

Colleen Carroll Campbell:

'Among Catholics, the most egregious example of Obama's broken promise of religious tolerance is the one dominating diocesan headlines now: His administration's push for a mandate that would require Catholic institutions to violate the teachings of their church by covering contraceptives in their health care plans — including sterilization and drugs that induce abortions.

'The mandate would be controversial even if accompanied by the standard religious exemption that allows faith-based organizations to opt out of government regulations that violate their religious beliefs. But the Obama administration has gone a step further, by crafting a religious exemption for the mandate so narrow that it excludes nearly all Catholic hospitals, elementary and secondary schools, colleges and universities and charitable organizations — virtually everyone, it seems, except Catholic parishes and religious orders. The upshot: Catholic colleges that teach abortion is evil must pay for abortifacient drugs for their students and Catholic hospitals that refuse to sterilize patients must subsidize sterilization for their employees.'

This is a militantly secular administration that uses federal regulatory agencies to legislate policies that simply would have no traction in Congress.
Read more: http://www.stltoday.com/news/opinion/columns/colleen-carroll-campbell/article_364e32fb-45fc-536f-bfc6-f7a703a3b77a.html#ixzz1arP1ngmS

"The Exasperation of a Democratic Billionaire"

2011-10-15T10:06:00.001-04:00

Mortimer Zuckerman is interviewed about our current crisis and the president. He compares Obama to Reagan:

'I was not a Republican and I was not an admirer of his before I knew him," continues Mr. Zuckerman. "And you know, Harry Truman had a wonderful definition for the presidency. He said the president has to be someone who can persuade the American people to do what they don't want to do and to like it. And that's what you have to do. Somebody like Reagan had that authority. He was liked so much and he had a kind of moral authority. That's what this president has lost."

What is "ideology" and what is wrong with it?

2011-10-09T18:26:00.003-04:00

A thoughtful post by Fr. Dwight Longenecker. An excerpt:

'Ideologies are most often false religions. Ideologies are for people with too much pride or too few brains, or too little courage to actually take a religion (any religion) seriously and follow it to it's proper conclusion. Instead they jump on the bandwagon of some shallow ideology (and all ideologies are shallow) and seek some sort of economic or social or political solution.'

"Steve Jobs: The Secular Prophet"

2011-10-09T08:59:00.003-04:00

Nice piece about technology as a source of hope.

An excerpt:

'Steve Jobs was extraordinary in countless ways—as a designer, an innovator, a (demanding and occasionally ruthless) leader. But his most singular quality was his ability to articulate a perfectly secular form of hope. Nothing exemplifies that ability more than Apple's early logo, which slapped a rainbow on the very archetype of human fallenness and failure—the bitten fruit—and turned it into a sign of promise and progress.

'That bitten apple was just one of Steve Jobs's many touches of genius, capturing the promise of technology in a single glance. The philosopher Albert Borgmann has observed that technology promises to relieve us of the burden of being merely human, of being finite creatures in a harsh and unyielding world.'

Dark energy, accelerating expansion of the universe, etc.

2011-10-08T07:10:00.004-04:00

My knowledge of physics is quite limited, though I am fortunate that my very gifted high school teacher gave me a lifelong interest and appreciation of it. Yesterday's interview with Nobel Prize winner Adam Reiss on NPR was fascinating.

What Dr. Reiss and his fellow recipients discovered in studying a supernova was that its vast matter continues to accelerate. That does not make sense, at least under the assumptions we live with. An explosion on Earth will accelerate particles initially, but gravity gradually slows down those particles. Dr. Reiss and his group have evidence that the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate; therefore, gravity does not seem to have the expected effects. Thus, the Big Bang seems to be continuously banging after all these years.

Isaac Newton has been dead for almost three hundred years, and physics continues to thrill and mystify. In fact, the mysteries of physics are similar to Christian sacraments: they are truths partially revealed. Newton was a genius who dabbled in all kinds of subjects, including the occult, while pioneering the Enlightenment. Other greats have followed. Most were far more religious than they would admit because the physicist wants to understand the secrets of the universe: space, motion, stars, origins, life, death, and the future. Such inquiry requires a fusion of reason and faith that the theologian more gladly and willingly accepts and admits. Some geniuses such as Stephen Hawking fool themselves through an intense faith in no faith; they are more sophisticated versions of Flannery O'Connor's Hazel Motes in Wise Blood.

My purpose is not to criticize physicists or to bring them back down to the little planet of my small mind, but rather, to say that they are on a noble humanistic endeavor more closely akin to the work of St. Thomas Aquinas than they realize. They know they are on a mission bigger than themselves. They asks questions which are ultimately religious, even if those questions are postulated in scientic terms.

UPDATE: In another development in physics, scientists claim to have clocked a particle called a neutrino at a speed faster than the speed of light. If so, there will be an exception that swallows the rule that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light.

Struggling with religious faith...

2011-10-06T14:33:00.002-04:00

A discussion of David Horowitz's book, A Point in Time. Horowitz says:

"I wish I could place my trust in the hands of a Creator," he writes forlornly at one point. "I wish I could look on my life and the lives of my children and all I have loved and see them as preludes to a better world. But, try as I might, I cannot."
Jeff Jacoby responds:

'Judaism regards human mortality not as a reflection of the world's meaninglessness, but as G0d's greatest gift to the men and women He creates in His image. A lifetime — that brief window between dust and dust — is the opportunity He grants each of us to become His partners in creation by making the world a better, kinder, more hopeful place. Our job is not to accept the world as it is, nor to make our peace with the idea that eventually we "will be no one and nowhere." Judaism believes in life after death, but it is only in life before death that human achievement is possible.'

What if the classics were more valuable than for reaffirming our own thoughts?

2011-10-06T14:29:00.002-04:00

It is possible to miss the boat.

"Imagination rules the world."

2011-10-06T14:25:00.002-04:00

Napoleon said it, not Steve Jobs, but Jobs had plenty of interesting things to say.

An excerpt:

“Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure — these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.” [Stanford commencement speech, June 2005]

Does a religious group have the right to determine who is out of the fold and may be fired?

2011-10-05T19:24:00.004-04:00

We are Americans, a nation of religious dissenters and land speculators, not Frenchmen used to centralized control of almost everything and a militantly secular political order. More at Get Religion on a Supreme Court case involving a firing at a Lutheran school.

Ultimately, the question is whether an employee of a religious group can claim a property right in the job even if she dissents or diverges from the teachings of a religious group. I say no. The alternative is to require federal regulation of the hiring, adminstration, and employee discipline of religious institutions. That would make us like old Europe at best and N. Korea at worst.

Are we living in a time similar to the 16th century?

2011-10-05T19:13:00.001-04:00

Relativism is a lot older than modern times. The Anchoress has a nice piece in Our Sunday Visitor.

From homeschooling to Saint Rose Academy and the Dominican way

2011-10-04T16:30:00.009-04:00

Two years ago we started homeschooling our daughter. We found a good on-line curriculum and went to work. After one year, we could report some pretty solid results.

Our second year was not as good, and I can tell you why: learning, as I know from going to school and teaching, is done best within a community sharing common faith and understanding of the development of the soul. Our learning community was not much bigger than our nuclear family of three. No other homeschoolers in our area used our curriculum. My daughter's play group was great, but none of them was doing what we were doing. Last winter, my work had slowed down, and I had applied for admission to the Alabama State Bar. Each week I would drive to Alabama to shake hands and plan the next stage of my career. I was tired and distracted, so our little learning community got weaker. By the time my mother died in March, we had concluded that we could only homeschool if there were other local children using our curriculum.

Going back about twenty years, before I was Catholic, I bought a cassette tape of Benedictine monks in Belgium singing Gregorian chants. One tune in particular grabbed me: Adore te Devote. I did not know the lyrics, and there was no YouTube or internet in those days. Nonetheless, the piety of the song reaches out and pulls me by the ears and heart.

A few years later I was assistant to Russell Kirk at Piety Hill in Mecosta, Michigan. I discovered G.K. Chesterton and read his biography of perhaps the most famous and brilliant Dominican, Saint Thomas Aquinas: The Dumb Ox. There I learned the origins of Adoro te Devote. A year later a teaching colleague told me about the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, S.J., and I saw his translation of Saint Thomas' Adoro. I cry whenever it is sung during Mass, and sometimes, when I am kneeling at Adoration, I want to sing it aloud.

A few years later my wife and I attended the liturgy of perpetual vows for a Dominican Sister of Saint Cecilia in Nashville. Her best friend from high school is my cousin. At the reception following, my wife and I asked one of the sisters to pray for us because we wanted a child and were considering adoption. She replied that such prayers were her charism. We believed her and thanked her.

Yes, it was her charism: eight months later, my wife was expecting our child!

After law school, I was asked to prepare a will for a woman who had gone through RCIA and been received in the Church but was dying of cancer at the Dominican hospice next to Turner Field in Atlanta. (It is run by the Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne and is the only hospice to be featured on ESPN.) There I found "the peace that passes understanding" and knew the Dominicans could bring God's peace to the end of the earth... or to the end of life.

In August of 2010 I was driving around the Southside of Birmingham with my mother on a pretty but warm day. We saw a sister in a white habit and black veil. We pulled over to greet her. She told us she was new in town, on the faculty at Saint Rose Academy, and somewhat lost. Despite being Birmingham natives, my mother and I did not know where Saint Rose Academy was, but we drove around until we found it. By the time we finished conversing with this sister and another sister, I had determined that if I ever got back to Birmingham, I was going to place my daughter in the care of the Dominicans for her education.

My daughter is now a student at Saint Rose Academy, and we are more than pleased, not just at the quality of the faculty and learning community, but at the commitment to the Eucharist and personal conversion. My wife and I recently went to a meeting of the local chapter of Dominican Laity, and we are going to explore what God might call us to do through the Order of Preachers. We have both been catechists for years and believe God is calling us further up and further in.

As the Dominicans would say, Veritas et caritas!

Vanderbilt and religious organizations on campus

2011-09-24T08:40:00.000-04:00

At Vanderbilt University, I was an officer in the Saint Thomas More Society. To renew the annual charter of an organization getting campus money, you have to promise not to discriminate against anyone, even if they despise the mission and purpose of the organization. In practice, it's usually not trouble. So far, white supremacists have never tried to join the Black Law Students Association. Men can join the Women Law Students Association, though few do. Ridiculous rules eventually get ridiculous results however. It would be possible for large numbers of Christians to join the Muslim Student Association and elect a young Baptist deacon as president. It would be possible for members of the Federalist Society to "take over" the Trial Lawyers Association. In the current campus environment, it is more likely that a leftist and secular group would show up in large numbers to embarrass a conservative or orthodox religious group. Vanderbilt is least likely to be a place of campus unrest, but its absurd political correctness, when copied elsewhere, will make national news at some point.

No more "Heckler's Veto"

2011-09-24T08:24:00.003-04:00

Ten convicted of disrupting the Israeli ambassador's speech at UC-Irvine. They are free to picket, rally, and speak themselves, but not to make so much noise that a view they deplore cannot be heard at a scheduled campus event.

"How Civilizations Die"

2011-09-24T08:19:00.005-04:00

Reuven Brenner reviews David P. Goldman's (a.k.a. "Spengler") new book about demographics and destiny in Forbes.

State-sponsored killing for man who would not kill again, if he ever killed at all.

2011-09-24T08:12:00.000-04:00

Troy Davis insisted he was innocent until his lethal injection was administered by someone who supposedly took the Hypocratic Oath, which unfortunately has been watered down so that a Nazi camp doctor could say it:

I swear to fulfill, to the best of my ability and judgment, this covenant: I will respect the hard-won scientific gains of those physicians in whose steps I walk, and gladly share such knowledge as is mine with those who are to follow. I will apply, for the benefit of the sick, all measures [that] are required, avoiding those twin traps of overtreatment and therapeutic nihilism. I will remember that there is art to medicine as well as science, and that warmth, sympathy, and understanding may outweigh the surgeon's knife or the chemist's drug. I will not be ashamed to say "I know not," nor will I fail to call in my colleagues when the skills of another are needed for a patient's recovery. I will respect the privacy of my patients, for their problems are not disclosed to me that the world may know. Most especially must I tread with care in matters of life and death. If it is given me to save a life, all thanks. But it may also be within my power to take a life; this awesome responsibility must be faced with great humbleness and awareness of my own frailty. Above all, I must not play at God. I will remember that I do not treat a fever chart, a cancerous growth, but a sick human being, whose illness may affect the person's family and economic stability. My responsibility includes these related problems, if I am to care adequately for the sick. I will prevent disease whenever I can, for prevention is preferable to cure. I will remember that I remain a member of society, with special obligations to all my fellow human beings, those sound of mind and body as well as the infirm. If I do not violate this oath, may I enjoy life and art, respected while I live and remembered with affection thereafter. May I always act so as to preserve the finest traditions of my calling and may I long experience the joy of healing those who seek my help. —

Written in 1964 by Louis Lasagna, Academic Dean of the School of Medicine at Tufts University, and used in many medical schools today. The ancient version follows, and we moderns are too "advanced" to say it:

I swear by Apollo Physician and Asclepius and Hygieia and Panaceia and all the gods and goddesses, making them my witnesses, that I will fulfill according to my ability and judgment this oath and this covenant: To hold him who has taught me this art as equal to my parents and to live my life in partnership with him, and if he is in need of money to give him a share of mine, and to regard his offspring as equal to my brothers in male lineage and to teach them this art—if they desire to learn it—without fee and covenant; to give a share of precepts and oral instruction and all the other learning to my sons and to the sons of him who has instructed me and to pupils who have signed the covenant and have taken an oath according to the medical law, but no one else. I will apply dietetic measures for the benefit of the sick according to my ability and judgment; I will keep them from harm and injustice. I will neither give a deadly drug to anybody who asked for it, nor will I make a suggestion to this effect. Similarly I will not give to a woman an abortive remedy. In purity and holiness I will guard my life and my art. I will not use the knife, not even on sufferers from stone, but will withdraw in favor of such men as are engaged in this work. Whatever houses I may visit, I will come for the benefit of the sick, remaining free of all intentional injustice, of all mischief and in particular of sexual relations with both female and male persons, be they free or slaves. What I may see or hear in the course of the treatment or even outside of the treatment in regard to the life of men, which on no account one must spread abroad, I will keep to myself, holding such things shameful to be spoken about. If I fulfill this oath and do not violate it, may it be granted to me to enjoy life and art, being honored with fame among all men for all time to come; if I transgress it and swear falsely, may the opposite of all this be my lot.

—Translation from the Greek by Ludwig Edelstein. From The Hippocratic Oath: Text, Translation, and Interpretation, by Ludwig Edelstein. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1943.

HHS wants to define what a religion is and does.

2011-09-21T22:59:00.000-04:00

The fascism of the contraceptive advocates. Sr. Mary Ann Walsh responds: 'In a tacit acknowledgement that this violates the Constitution's cherished respect for religious liberty, HHS provides an exemption for religious employers -- but with a catch. The church agency can only claim exemption if it primarily serves people of its own faith. It also must meet other requirements, such as employing mostly people of its own faith. 'This means HHS is setting itself up to determine what constitutes church ministry and who Jesus meant when he referred to serving "the least of my brethren."' This nation was founded and established state-by-state by religious dissenters who disagreed with the rulers, whoever they might have been. Our constitutional law was developed case-by-case (and seldom by statute) by Congregationalists, Baptists, Anabaptists, Methodists, Mormons, Catholics, Jehovah's Witnesses, and many others who would not accept the intolerant decrees of arbitrary governments. Would you like to submit a comment as solicited by the Federal Register? Please do. Click here.

9/11 Thoughts

2011-09-11T19:28:00.001-04:00

It's now been ten years since I sat in an office tower and heard about passenger jets deliberately rammed into the two towers of the WTC. I listened to the radio and found that every broadcaster was covering it: ESPN, FM-Rock, etc. I felt helpless and depressed. The "tower jumpers" caught on camera illustrate the despair of those days.

In retrospect, I wish President Bush had called for volunteers. I was already too old for military service, but I would have done anything else. This blog is my weak attempt to discuss the pathologies of our world. I wish I had something original to say today, but I am proud of my several writings on the attacks and their effects.

Despair did not win. We Americans are a people of faith. Our faith is not unified, but that means that our faith is not dependent on any particular cult or priesthood. We have faith in the future. We are the children of those who gambled the present to cross an ocean (or the Rio Grande) to come to a country where they might be able to make their own way. We are not one republic but tens of thousands, if not tens of millions, of little republics, where people learn to govern and to advance themselves (sometimes well and sometimes not so well). We are more diffused and far more creative, even in a bad decade, than the nihilists who hate us.

I'll conclude by linking to Russell Kirk and leaving the exhortation: Nil desperandum.

Rick Perry and Me

2011-09-10T08:40:00.002-04:00

I don't know him. I never paid attention to him until this past month. I am a student of American messianism, and I am just as concerned about the conservatives' search for a messiah in 2012 as the liberals' finding one in 2008. If we are (un)lucky, Rick Perry is a conservative Bill Clinton and will show great political talents. There is something about him that indicates his ambition has no bounds, that he might be politically brilliant but lacking in what Edmund Burke called the "moral imagination." But as a matter of practice, I generally don't endorse presidential candidates until they are out of office, if not dead.

"The Ugliness of Cheering for Capital Punishment"

2011-09-10T08:33:00.000-04:00

Rod Dreher makes a good point.

When I taught prep school, we would have more than one expulsion per year. Even when the expelled student was trouble to all, there was no rejoicing when he was gone. An expulsion is a failure. Expulsion means the school failed to do what it was established to do: to lead a teenager to maturity, reasoned judgment, and ordered liberty. That's not to say that the expelled student did not usually force the school to take such radical action to prevent the poisonous actions of one to undermine the school as a whole. An expulsion was sometimes necessary to prevent the undisciplined student from taking down one or more good students with him.

Likewise with the death penalty. If we have to execute a heinous criminal because he is a threat to public safety as long as he is alive, that is nothing to cheer about. Such criminals are few and far between and generally have death-cult followings. There is societal failure in the execution of a psychopath, even if his execution was a public necessity.

The Catholic Catechism says:

2267 Assuming that the guilty party's identity and responsibility have been fully determined, the traditional teaching of the Church does not exclude recourse to the death penalty, if this is the only possible way of effectively defending human lives against the unjust aggressor. If, however, non-lethal means are sufficient to defend and protect people's safety from the aggressor, authority will limit itself to such means, as these are more in keeping with the concrete conditions of the common good and more in conformity to the dignity of the human person.

Today, in fact, as a consequence of the possibilities which the state has for effectively preventing crime, by rendering one who has committed an offense incapable of doing harm - without definitely taking away from him the possibility of redeeming himself - the cases in which the execution of the offender is an absolute necessity "are very rare, if not practically nonexistent."

Electricity is restored.

2011-09-10T08:11:00.001-04:00

We lost our electric power on Labor Day as Tropical Storm Lee gave Alabama a Panamanian rainy season. It was restored on Thursday afternoon. My daughter did her homework by flashlight.

My first Latin Mass

2011-09-04T22:19:00.002-04:00

We went to Blessed Sacrament today with my father. He has not been inside the old and beautiful parish since my cousin was baptized in 1948. It is in a part of town that now has few Catholics. The bishop has designated it as the parish in the diocese where the Latin Mass is prayed every Sunday. So we went out of curiosity and a sense of history.

Knowing my conservative friends and views, some might ask: Why did you wait so long? There are several reasons. 1. I became a Catholic because of the witness of post-Vatican II Catholics. 2. I have watched vicious battles in the Episcopal church over liturgy and want to avoid them in the faith I have chosen. 3. It was never convenient. 4. I love the Church, even those in it whose liturgical practices I hope wither away.

There is more to say later. Much to take in.

Much to write... little time and lots of pain

2011-09-04T21:41:00.004-04:00

We now live in Alabama. Our stuff, most of it at least, is now in our new home. I've been working here since April, so it is great to have us all united. We are meeting our neighbors as we walk our dogs. My daughter is enrolled in a parochial school run by the Nashville Dominicans. Click on the link and listen to them sing!

Two weeks ago we went to early Mass in Georgia and that afternoon packed a cargo van full of our most precious stuff. When I unloaded it that night in Alabama, I dislocated my shoulder. It still hurts.

I went to confession for breaking the Sabbath. Readers of this blog know that last summer I got the very strong conviction that doing routine chores and work, unless it is an emergency (not an obsessive-compulsion disguised as an emergency), is to cheat God. I cheated God and paid for it. He "arranged" the Israelites' Exodus. Why should I worry about logistics?

Pray for us. We are overwhelmed, and I cannot manhandle these boxes. We have some nibbles from would-be renters of our Georgia house. We thank God for them. Some stresses are coming to an end, but we still need to get settled, and we can't find much of anything yet.

My wife and I attended Our Lady of Sorrows Church last Sunday and sang in the choir. We were welcomed as family. They loved my mother very much. During the prayer before Mass the choir leader mentioned Mom by name and thanked God for her presence. Present she was!

If you didn't have a word for "Holy Spirit," you might have to invent it to describe people like my mother. To meet her was to remember her. She spread a lot of love, humor, and good cheer. Her fellow choir members appreciated her, and they embrace my family with all her warmth.

So here I am in my native city taking care of the living through the graces given by the dead. As Etienne Gilson said, "The dead alone give us energy." What could be more true!

[Above: Our Lady of Sorrows Church, Homewood, AL, and Saint Gianna Beretta Molla, now a close friend of my mother.]

Kinky Friedman for Rick Perry

2011-08-27T14:36:00.002-04:00

Barack Obama is in trouble now. He might as well go back to Chicago if Texas' most famous Jewish cowboy, a lifelong Democrat, has endorsed Rick Perry. Do read the story. Kinky Friedman seldom fails to entertain:

'As a Jewish cowboy (or “Juusshh,” as we say in Texas), I know Rick Perry to be a true friend of Israel, like Bill Clinton and George W. before him. There exists a visceral John Wayne kinship between Israelis and Texans, and Rick Perry gets it. That’s why he’s visited Israel on many more occasions than Obama, who’s been there exactly zero times as president. If I were Obama I wouldn’t go either. His favorability rating in Israel once clocked in at 4 percent. Say what you will about the Israelis, but they are not slow out of the chute. They know who their friends are. On the topic of the Holy Land, there remains the little matter of God. God talks to televangelists, football coaches, and people in mental hospitals. Why shouldn’t he talk to Rick Perry? In the spirit of Joseph Heller, I have a covenant with God. I leave him alone and he leaves me alone. If, however, I have a big problem, I ask God for the answer. He tells Rick Perry. And Rick tells me.'

Fr. James E. Coyle, 1873-1921

2011-08-20T20:18:00.005-04:00

I have known most of my life that a Catholic priest was shot dead on the front porch of the rectory of St. Paul's Church on 3rd Avenue North in Birmingham, but I am now reading a book that tells the story of the shooting, Hugo Black (who successfully defended the shooter), the Ku Klux Klan (which funded his defense), Catholicism in Alabama in the early days of the 20th century, and what life was like in a Southern steel town full of heat, smoke, and fear after the Great War.

I am reading about Fr. Coyle in Rising Road: A True Tale of Love, Race, and Religion in America. The author is Sharon Davies, who is a former prosecutor, law professor at Ohio State, and excellent storyteller. Here she is interviewed on EWTN by Fr. Mitch Pacwa, S.J.

Fr. Coyle's life was celebrated at St. Paul's recently with a Mass on the 90th anniversary of his death. (My old friend Jim Pinto helped organize the event, and representatives from both the Alabama Jewish Federation and the United Methodist Church attended as well as Fr. Coyle's grand niece.) I have driven and walked up 3rd Avenue all my life, but I now feel the presence of a martyr. More about Fr. Coyle here in an Irish source.

Packing to move during World Youth Day and other important events...

2011-08-20T20:04:00.002-04:00

Readers of this blog know that posts have been sparse since my mother died in March. I wish I could do better, but the federal stimulus money for my writers, editors, and photographers never came, despite my keen connections in Washington.

My wife and I are packing our stuff to move to my home state of Alabama. I am working hard and living, for at least a couple more weeks, in two cities.

The Anchoress has a good post on Catholic education and a round-up on World Youth Day.

Evangelical Catholicism v. Counter-Reformation Catholicism

2011-08-08T20:27:00.003-04:00

I have to agree with George Weigel that the rise of a dynamic Catholicism based upon preaching the Gospel rather than institutional preservation is a welcome development.

The news media does not get it. NPR's reporter conjectured the other day that Archbishop Charles Chaput was appointed to the vacant seat in Philadelphia in order to help the Republicans in the next presidential election! (FYI- The Republicans have not carried Pennsylvania since 1988.) I can assure you that Archbishop Chaput, whose brother's family was one of the first gung-ho Catholic families I got to know, has much higher goals. He wants no less for the fire of the Holy Spirit to make Philadelphia truly a city of brotherly love, where the widows and orphans are embraced and sheltered, the unborn are given love by their families, the prisoners are reformed by love, the poor are clothed and fed, the suicidal and addicted are given hope, and a Beatific Vision is lived. He wants the culture of Pennsylvania transformed by the love of God. Pennsylvania's electoral votes are very small oysters in comparison.

Anglicans going to Rome

2011-08-08T20:14:00.001-04:00

Not in droves, but they will leaven the loaf as their liturgy, music, and aesthetics blend into the heavenly chorus in union with the Holy See.

"The Healing of Memory"

2011-08-08T19:59:00.002-04:00

Pentimento has another good post and reflects on an excellent post by Fallen Sparrow. An excerpt from FS re the madness of the French Revolution:

'[R]eading those books and seeing the horrifying historical result of man's quest for Enlightenment on his own terms, absent any consideration other than exertion of force and scientific rationalism, I sensed through the smoke blowing uptown from Ground Zero my own mortality.

'Somewhere in the midst of that I became a religious man. Not a churchgoer, not yet, but I met God in the music of men who loved Him and sought to walk in His ways. In the midst of the bleakness of alcoholism and Enlightenment philosophy and history I found consolation in listening to J.S. Bach and Joseph Haydn. I fell asleep every night listening to Bach's 2nd Partita for Solo violin. At times when I was tempted to jump in front of a subway train, I remembered that I would never get to hear Bach again, and so I stepped back from the platform edge.'

St. Simons Island- 2011

2011-08-08T19:33:00.002-04:00

I attended a law conference and took my family on a brief vacation. We ate at Barbara Jean's in the Village (among other good places); I recommend it. We got up at 6 a.m. on Saturday, Sunday, and today to watch the sun rise at low tide.

I only wish I had time to read. I'm working on Alexander Solzhenitsyn's August 1914 and St. Therese's Story of a Soul but did not have any sittin' time, though I did get some sleep.

Nietsche, Post-Modernism, and the Love of Death in the Pursuit of Power

2011-07-28T21:56:00.002-04:00

David Warren:

'Let me fix upon this word "perverted," for both Anders Breivik and Osama bin Laden have shared in an advanced conception of "justice." Each went to extraordinary lengths to justify what he was doing.

'Lenin, Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, and the rest, were never so naked as to appear in public without a justification. It is not given to human beings to be free of moral conscience - for once again, there is a natural moral order. A person can stop justifying his own behaviour for no longer than he can hold his breath, and the coldest-blooded killer ever born is entirely human in that respect.

'This distinction is crucially important. The moral sense - the sense of right and wrong - is not something a person has or doesn't have. He always has it. The question is whether it has been twisted. It becomes twisted, perverted, when we begin to think the end will justify the means; that we ourselves have the gift to discern "the greatest good for the greatest number."'

Great piece. If you reject the idea of evil, all you have left is therapy unanchored to any type of law.

Is a church sanctuary for us or for God?

2011-07-28T21:50:00.002-04:00

Fr. Dwight Longenecker:

'[T]he church should speak of the qualities of the One who dwells there. So the Catholic Church should be beautiful. How do we make it beautiful? We can make it beautiful by putting pretty things in it, but this is only ornamentation. For a church to be truly beautiful it needs not just pretty things in it; it has to be beautiful from the depth of its design. The beauty can’t be just skin deep. It has to be integral to the building as a whole. It has to be beautiful from the ground up and has to be designed from the beginning as a beautiful building.'

No, it's not about us.

Reason, Doubt, and Conversion

2011-07-28T21:46:00.001-04:00

Fr. Dwight Longenecker:

'Apparently you can't reason a schizophrenic out of his belief. What he is seeing and hearing is 'real' to him. This is not to call all atheists schizophrenic, but the analogy is there--because in a similar way you cannot reason him out of his seemingly rock solid perception of reality: that there is no God.

'The only thing that can change a schizophrenic is something that alters the chemicals in his brain back to the proper function again. Similarly, the only thing that can convert an atheist (or an agnostic or an unbeliever of any kind) is the divine light--revelation--grace--a supernatural gift which opens blind eyes.

'Now what really teases me is that the same thing can be said about a theist who has never really examined their belief system. They too have accepted a rock solid basic assumption and have never questioned it. What they need, as we all need is a shock to the system and an infusion of grace which takes their theism out of the comfort zone into the reality zone. This is what we call conversion.'

"Finding Angus: A True Story of Love, War, and Family"

2011-07-28T21:41:00.003-04:00

We romantize World War II and forget the desperation and the loss. Angus Zahrt was lost somewhere in the Pacific at the end of the war, and one woman grieved his loss the rest of her life. This is a story about David Dobbs' mother.

"The Return of a Zero Sum World"

2011-07-28T21:28:00.004-04:00

I am not as pessimistic as Michael Lind, but I agree with him that the old economy has been dead since 2008, and all the crony capitalists in the world cannot revive it:

'The most probable outcome, when the depth of wealth destruction becomes clear, is likely to be crony capitalism -- the use of political power to provide jobs and income for a much greater number of self-styled "venture capitalists," corporate managers, nonprofit workers, university professors and highly paid public sector managers (not ordinary civil servants like schoolteachers and police officers) than the slowly growing, post-crash economy can actually afford. The right will try to preserve and expand a simulacrum of free enterprise, in the form of defense contractors and privatized welfare state functions. The left wing of the elite will try to create a zombie economy based on taxpayer-subsidized "green industries" that would collapse without tax subsidies and mandates on utility rate-payers. Each party will try to cut the zombie sector of its rival in order to fund its own pet zombies. In the long run, the attempt to prevent an elite economy that is already dead from decomposing, by putting it into suspended animation, is unlikely to succeed, but the project could last a decade or two. Bubble Conservatism and Bubble Progressivism will morph into Zombie Conservatism and Zombie Progressivism.'

"The Possible Conversion of Al Levine"

2011-07-26T22:55:00.003-04:00

Pentimento writes another meditation linking art to the personal to the universal to the transcendent.

"From Norway to Hell"

2011-07-26T22:31:00.003-04:00

Walther Russell Mead:

'We can be reasonably confident that an increasingly chaotic and stressful 21st century will generate more bitter nutjobs and place more destructive power in their hands. Democracy and affluence won’t cure it; the same forces that raise those golden arches build bombs to knock them down.

'To say all this is not to buy into the case for gloom. Armageddon is no more inevitable in the next century than utopia at least as far as human beings can discern. The extraordinary scientific and technological flowering of the last few hundred years could lead us to either destination, to neither, or to some kind of intermediate zone marked by elements of both. (The last possibility has my vote as the most likely, but nobody can really know.)

'The only conclusion that makes sense to me is that human beings are stuck in a condition of radical uncertainty. Something big and earth shaking is going on around us, but the information we have does not allow us to predict where it all goes.

'In my view, this is one of the reasons that belief in a transcendent power beyond the human mind is intellectually necessary to grapple successfully with the realities of our time. When the determinist progressives threw God under the bus, they threw away the possibility of an integrated world view that has room both for scientific and rational analysis on the one hand and a honest, unsparing appraisal of the radical uncertainty around us on the other.'

What would Lyndon Johnson do?

2011-07-24T20:10:00.006-04:00

Lyndon Johnson is discussed quite often on this blog because he was a remarkable man and president. My brother complained last week that the Republicans have prevented President Barack Obama from passing his agenda and that it deserves opportunity to work.

I could not help but turn the question around: Would a Democratic president's agenda die on the vine with 60 votes in the Democratic Senate and a big Democratic majority in the House if Lyndon Johnson were either (a) President or (b) Senate majority leader? Of course not. Johnson would have bought or intimidated dozens of Republicans into supporting the stimulus bill, through tax cuts, pork barrel, or whatever, and thereby been able to arm-twist or persuade Republicans to vote for other Democratic proposals. Who do I blame? (1) Harry Reid, (2) Barack Obama, and (3) Nancy Pelosi. Their job was to win broad enough support to pass the Democratic agenda. By failing to get significant Republican votes while spending $800 billion for the biggest barrel of pork ever, they demonstrated that there would be nothing in it for Republicans to support any later comprehensive reform bills. The Democratic super majority burned most of its seed with the first big bill.

Good leadership, Democratic or Republican, knows that poking the eyes of the opposition will usually backfire sooner rather than later. Good leadership knows that legislative success, especially in comprehensive reform bills, is never certain. If the Democratic leadership visits any oracles or holds any seances, they might want to speak to LBJ. The other Texan in the New Deal pantheon (besides John Nance Garner) is Sam Rayburn, Speaker of the House for 17 years, shown above receiving a kiss from the most successful engineer of legislation in the 20th century.

What a downgrade of credit rating means...

2011-07-24T19:05:00.003-04:00

A few years ago, a client of mine, a local development authority, received the terrible news that the insurance company which insured its floating-rate bonds had been downgraded by Standard & Poors. The client, which has always serviced its debt promptly and was healthy, saw its interest rates skyrocket until it could restructure its debt through a large letter of credit to replace the insurance policy that was no longer adequate to assure bondholders that they could hold and rely on those bonds. The cost of the restructuring was significant, not unlike that of reissuing the bonds, and it was more than problematical to explain the cost to the elected officials and the taxpayers.

When it comes to government debts, I am a Hamiltonian and not a Jeffersonian. A country which defaults does not recover easily or quickly. Just ask my cousin in Argentina. Here is a piece about how a downgrade could rock the country just as my client was rocked a few years ago.

Is this why I seldom enjoyed math class or paid attention?

2011-07-24T14:26:00.001-04:00

Khan Academy is something I have not checked out. Hat tip to Glenn Reynolds.

Not recognizing things...

2011-07-24T13:38:00.006-04:00

'But everyone over 50 in America feels a certain cultural longing now. They hear the new culture out of the radio, the TV, the billboard, the movie, the talk show. It is so violent, so sexualized, so politicized, so rough. They miss the old America they were born into, 50 to 70 years ago. And they fear, deep down, that this new culture, the one their children live in, isn't going to make it. Because it is, in essence, an assaultive culture, from the pop music coming out of the rental car radio to the TSA agent with her hands on your kids' buttocks. We are increasingly strangers here, and we fear for the future. There are, by the way, 100 million Americans over 50. A third of the nation. That's a lot of displaced people. They are part of the wrong-track numbers.

'So is this. In the Old America there were a lot of bad parents. There always are, because being a parent is hard, and not everyone has the ability or even the desire. But in the old America you knew it wasn't so bad, because the culture could bring the kids up. Inadequate parents could sort of say, "Go outside and play in the culture," and the culture -- relatively innocent, and boring -- could be more or less trusted to bring the kids up. Popular songs, the messages in movies -- all of it was pretty hopeful, and, to use a corny old word, wholesome. Grown-ups now know you can't send the kids out to play in the culture, because the culture will leave them distorted and disturbed.'

Peggy Noonan

This is a great short essay. It begins by discussing the problems in negotiating the debt ceiling but goes on to things deeper.

"Real Men"

2011-07-10T21:09:00.006-04:00

Pentimento reflects on efforts of Catholic men to reinvent masculinity in the 21st century, though often with incomplete or very wounded understandings of masculinity. I am particularly sad for Fr. John Corapi.

Having been a Protestant during the scandals of televangelists Jim Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart, I am embarrassed that an effective Catholic preacher is in trouble. I do not know whether he violated the disciplines of his priesthood and order, but I am appalled that he refuses to cooperate with his order.

He is a "celebrity" priest. He never discouraged publicity, and he obviously enjoys attention. He is not Saint Bernard, trying without success to return to his Cistercian cell. I learned today that he had established a ministry with little supervision from his missionary order and thus was free to burn himself up. Shame on the order for giving him too long a leash. Shame on him for poking the eyes of his superiors.

Vaccines and Human Tissue

2011-07-10T19:57:00.008-04:00

Dr. Joseph Mercola here discusses the use of aborted human issue for the making of vaccines. (My wife likes his writings on health.)

Dr. Helen Ratajczak, a former researcher for a major pharmaceutical company, raised a ruckus when she said that vaccines might be related to the increase in autism and also noted that twenty-three vaccines are made from derivatives of aborted human tissue. CBS News made a report sympathetic to her findings (without much comment about the aborted human tissue) and is getting both praise and criticism.

This blog seldom weighs in on scientific debates, whether it is about global warming or vaccines. Unlike my fellow blogger Pentimento, I know nothing of autism. My knowledge of science is limited to high school chemistry, physics, and biology and my reading of Thomas Kuhn's Structures of Scientific Revolutions in college. I am skeptical of scientific assertions of almost any kind, especially those that come from a paradigm in which scientists in the mainstream are invested in its presumed truth. (They will defend their orthodoxy with the zeal of high priests.) Paradigms, even great ones, usually burst after a few generations, and scientists, on the whole, have a very hard time admitting the extent of their own cultural and professional blinders. But just as war is too important to be left to the generals, science, public health in particular, is too important to be left to the scientists.

Dr. Ratajczak is interviewed here and blasted here and here.

This blog is primarily concerned with morality and the application and practice of Catholic teaching, so I have linked to a website that seeks to persuade our scientific and medical communities not to use aborted human tissue for research or vaccines, Children of God for Life.

Another blogging interruption...

2011-07-10T18:57:00.004-04:00

A year ago my wife read this post by Fr. Dwight Longenecker about Camp Kahdalea and Camp Chosatonga in Brevard, North Carolina. Fr. Longenecker goes up there during the summers to serve as chaplain and finds a beautiful catholicity in the directors and staff. Despite our lives being up in the air since Mom's death, my wife and I agreed that we needed to get our daughter to Camp Kahdalea. With prayer and help from family, she is there.

We drove her up last weekend, and as Bobby Sherman once promised in a song, I'm writing her every day. No electronic devices are allowed. The cabins are on stilts. The mountains hem the soccer field to a small size. It's all about nature, fellowship, activities, art, and song.

I am exhausted from my grief, burdens, new job, and travels, though I am blessed every day. I slept twelve hours last night and another two hours this afternoon.

This morning I cried on the way to Mass. As my wife and I recited the Luminous Mysteries of the Rosary, I pictured my mother telling me during the 3rd mystery: Convert! Trust in God. Then during the 4th, I could see her as witness to that timeless event, the Transfiguration. During the 5th, I joined her in the Eucharist. Yes, the Eucharist is our unity. It is how I can still touch her.

On Mondays I often go to noon Mass downtown. I pass restaurants as I walk and smell lunch, yet I walk on and usually skip lunch. The Eucharist contains all the love in the world.

I regret I did not write a good Fourth of July post. I enjoy doing so. Here are my Independence Day posts from 2010 and 2008. Veritas et caritas.