The Hole In The Floor

Socrates quotes - Sent via Email Yourself!

2009-09-18T21:05:00.001-06:00

http://refspace.com/quotes/Socrates/s:0

I cannot teach anybody anything, I can only make them think.

The Catholic Donnybrook; One Kennedy Legacy? | First Things Then there is this...

2009-09-01T22:07:00.001-06:00

http://www.firstthings.com/onthesquare/2009/09/the-catholic-donnybrook-one-kennedy-legacy

Grief over Kennedy's passing (and, I suspect the resounding end it brings to an irreclaimable and more innocent-seeming era) should not permit us to pretend that serious effects of Kennedy's work simply do not matter. It matters that through Sen. Kennedy's influence many Catholics voted for candidate Obama; they now languish in a kind of suspended animation while the president runs a cup-and-ball trick with life issues—now you see it, now you don't. Is taxpayer-funded abortion covered under Obamacare? Will healthcare rationing demand physician-aid-in-dying in place of treatment? No, not under that cup, not under that cup. The hand is quicker than the eye and the truth is become an illusion.

The Catholic Donnybrook; One Kennedy Legacy? | First Things

2009-09-01T22:01:00.002-06:00

http://www.firstthings.com/onthesquare/2009/09/the-catholic-donnybrook-one-kennedy-legacy

Sen. Kennedy did his share of private and public good but then, we most of us do our share of good, proportionate to our means and connections; it is by no means disrespectful to the memory of this influential and powerful man to recall that he pivoted on abortion during a moment of crucial debate, and as Kennedy was then the very voice of Catholic politics, that mattered. His turnaround on abortion gave the American Catholic the means of paying lip service to life while enabling a culture of death. They didn't even have to think about it, because Ted Kennedy had thought about it for them, and even fed them their lines.

Pope cites Teilhardian vision of the cosmos as a 'living host' | National Catholic Reporter

2009-07-29T22:34:00.001-06:00

Pope cites Teilhardian vision of the cosmos as a 'living host' | National Catholic Reporter

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The Democracy of the Dead

2009-07-08T22:43:00.003-06:00

G.K. Chesterton notes that tradition is intrinsically democratic: "Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about.

Thank You Lord!

2009-07-07T20:44:00.002-06:00

2009-06-08T22:51:00.001-06:00

Click On Link Below & Watch!

2009-05-11T19:42:00.002-06:00

Catholic Vote

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Human Backups...Coming Soon To A Medical Center Near You!

2009-04-29T00:22:00.005-06:00

By Wesley J. Smith...More proof in that embryonic stem cell research is not—and never has been—about getting some use out of leftover IVF embryos that are due to be destroyed anyway. A serious proposal has been forwarded in the UK that would allow people to make IVF embryos, not to bring to birth, but rather, solely for the purpose of storing them for later use as a source of stem cells. From the story:

Couples could be allowed to store embryos in order to use them to create new body parts or cure diseases.

Government legal and ethical experts are to discuss whether families can 'bank' embryos not just for procreation but also for use by doctors to create personalized treatments for parents and their children.

Now, [under UK law] embryos—the first stage of life after an egg has been successfully fertilized—can be stored for up to five years but only for procreation. But a huge ethical debate is set to erupt as the Government's fertility watchdog, the Human Fertilization and Embryology Authority (HFEA), moves closer to endorsing new developments in medical science. It will debate whether embryos could be stored to harvest important stem cells that have the ability to turn into any tissue type in the body.

Given that this is Brave New Britain, which already allows the creation of human/animal hybrid cloned embryos, the outcome of this "debate" is easy to predict.

This is figurative cannibalism, and it won't stop with embryos. Once the principle is accepted that living human beings can be objectified and used as a product, there is no way it will be limited to the earliest humans. Indeed, as I have often described, fetal farming is already on the table in bioethics discourse and some of the world's most notable medical journals have published articles urging that people with profound cognitive impairments be used as sources of organs and human subjects in medical experimentation.

Ideas have consequences. Once we state that human life does not have intrinsic moral value simply and merely because it is human, there isn't much that we cant justify.

The Clarity of First Things

2009-04-20T12:54:00.001-06:00

Certain matters are at the heart of what First Things magazine(firstthings.com) exists to do. The struggle to halt the slaughter of the unborn and the ill, for instance—the need to defend the weakest among us, constantly threatened by a culture that accepts abortion and euthanasia as easy devices with which to solve personal and social difficulties. We believe the United States to be a grand historical experiment, worth defending in its own right and inherently interesting to study. We work for the advancement of Jewish–Christian relations. We feel the divisions of Christianity—Protestant, Orthodox, and Catholic—as a scandal that shames all believers, even while we know that true ecumenism must begin with each tradition's theological integrity. We demand a society that feeds the hungry and cares for the poor. We know that the political effort to strip religion from the public square is an attempt to undermine the American experiment, and it will bring only disaster in its wake. On all this, we will not be silent, and we will be heard.

First Things is not a political magazine. It deals with religion, culture, and the moral structures of public life, and it does so in the politically indifferent light of philosophy, theology, literary theory, and historical study. We live, however, in strange days: a time in which the doing of such things—the very attempt to be serious—is itself a political act, with political consequences and political costs.

Politics is a secondary activity, of course. Even theology, philosophy, and poetry are secondary, in a sense: They may be first in the order of language—and thus first in the range of what a magazine can actually publish—but they come second to faith and prayer in the order of existential truth. Still, both politics and intellectual pursuits have a genuine importance and dignity precisely because, in their proper secondary places, they require neither false inflation to the all-encompassing nor false deflation to the insignificant.

"The first thing to be said about public life is that public life is not the first thing," Richard John Neuhaus declared when he launched First Things in 1990, and he added:

"By religion and public life we mean something like what Saint Augustine meant by the City of God and the City of Man. The twain inevitably do meet, but they must never be confused or conflated. Whether at the beginning of the fifth century or at the end of the twentieth, the particulars of their meeting are always ambiguous. At the deepest level the two cities are in conflict but, along the way toward history's end, they can be mutually helpful. The polis constituted by faith delineates the horizon, the possibilities and the limits, of the temporal polis. The first city keeps the second in its place, warning it against reaching for the possi-bilities that do not belong to it. At the same time, it elevates the second city, calling it to the virtue and justice that it is prone to neglect. Thus awareness of the ultimate sustains the modest dignity of the penultimate."

As the dead ideas of previous decades rear again their angry heads, we seem in many ways thrust back to where we were when the magazine began. This is a moment when the modest dignity of the penultimate must be reasserted. This is a day, again, for seriousness. This is a time, once more, for First Things.

Marilyn Chambers R. I. P.

2009-04-16T22:46:00.002-06:00

by Francis Beckwith

This morning I was greeted by a headline that the porn star, Marilyn Chambers (56), was found dead on Easter Sunday. Her obituary was written as if she had actually accomplished something. She was, of course, in her own way a "community organizer." So much so that ten years ago then-mayor of San Francisco, Willie Brown, declared a "Marilyn Chambers day." But compare her obituary to any mainstream media obituary of the late Jerry Falwell, a person who, I must confess, would sometimes annoy me to no end. He was not my kind of guy. He was a rural, white, Southern Baptist, who was sometimes embarrassingly uncharitable and not careful with his words when addressing issues with which many other Christians would be sympathetic (but who would nevertheless cringe upon hearing the Rev.'s less than measured presentation). And, most importantly, he was not on the right side in the Civil Rights struggle when it really counted (something, by the way, for which he would later repent). For someone like me--an ethnic, urban, Yankee, cradle Catholic who grew up in a liberal Democratic household--I could not imagine ever hanging with him.

And yet, the Rev. Falwell founded a university, started a social movement of great influence, pastored a church of several thousand for several decades, led many, many people to Christ, and as far as we know was a loving and devoted husband and father. (He was a person that even Larry Flynt called "friend"!) On the other hand, Ms. Chambers, who died young (as is the case with virtually everyone in her "profession"), is portrayed as a cultural trailblazer who enlightened our culture to the "blessings" of anonymous, promiscuous, widely diverse, and videotaped, copulation. For this reason, you will hear no lamenting of the innumerable lives on which her example made chic the infliction of countless miseries. You will not hear of the unborn children killed, the addictions borne and nurtured, the marriages decimated, the offspring abandoned, the spouses betrayed, or even the diseases contracted—spiritual, mental and physical—that her "trailblazing" facilitated.

We live in an age in which we know precisely what recycle bin our newsprint and soda bottles belong. But we have no idea what a human being is, what it's supposed to do, or who or what it is permissible to sleep with. So, this is the lesson of our time: the "good" man is the one who treats his garbage with greater care than his own soul. This is why, for our cultural gatekeepers, Ms. Chambers is an icon and the Rev. Falwell did not die soon enough.

Einstein on God

2009-04-10T17:16:00.000-06:00

I'm not an atheist and I don't think I can call myself a pantheist. We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many different languages. The child knows someone must have written those books. It does not know how. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangement of the books but doesn't know what it is. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of even the most intelligent human being toward God.

-Albert Einstein

High School & Dr. House

2009-04-07T21:14:00.005-06:00

Conformity is a confusing topic to discuss. Let's start with high school, where the young and impressionable roam.

My high school social scene was probably the same as yours. It was the popular kids vs the non-popular kids. The non-popular kids were made up by the nerds and the goth kids. I was the nerd who was often fascinated by the goth kids. How could I not be? They were ALL so anti-conformity and ALL so unique. They ALL wore dark clothes from Hot Topic instead of bright colored A&F polos made by the evil corporate. Their faces ALL exuded the misery and pain from living in suburbia America. They were the symbols of anti-conformity, because they conformed to rebel against conformity.

I hope you sense where this is going.

Many years after high school, while watching an episode of my favorite TV show, Dr. Gregory House said something that summed up my feeling on conformity during a conversation with a young doctor.

House

Dr. Spain (applying for a position on Dr. House's team): You know, I really admire the way you don't care what anyone thinks. You just do what you want, the way you want.

Dr. Wilson (Dr. House's best friend): So, you went to Hopkins for both undergrad and med school?

Dr. Spain: That's right.

House: He's in a band.

Dr. Spain: You into music?

House: Totally. What kind of music do you play?

Dr. Spain: Um, mostly blues, you know. James Cotton, some original stuff.

House: [pops a Vicodin] Oh, dude. You are so hired.

Dr. Spain: Really?

House: Not a chance.

Dr. Spain: Why?

House: Tattoo. [Dr. Spain turns his right arm to reveal a kanji symbol on his forearm.]

Dr. Spain: Wow. I thought you'd be the last person to have a problem with nonconformity.

House: Nonconformity, right. I can't remember the last time I saw a 20-something kid with a tattoo of an Asian letter on his wrist. You are one wicked free thinker. You want to be a rebel? Stop being cool. Wear a pocket protector like he[Wilson] does and get a haircut. Like the Asian kids who don't leave the library for 20 hours stretches, they're the ones who don't care what you think. Sayonara. [Dr. Spain leaves.]

Wilson: So should I go through all the resumes looking for Asian names?

House: Actually, the Asian kids are probably just responding to parental pressure, but my point is still valid.

2009-03-30T20:26:00.001-06:00

From The Unthinkable, Through The Debatable, By The Justifiable, Establishing The Unexceptionable!

2009-03-20T22:42:00.001-06:00

"Scientists believe that one way to obtain the matched cells needed to study diseases is to use a cell from an adult afflicted with that disease to create a genetically matched embryo and extract its stem cells. This approach — known as somatic cell nuclear transfer — is difficult, and no one has yet done it." Oh, right, "somatic cell nuclear transfer"—cloning and then killing.

Fr. Richard J. Neuhaus's voice still rings clear: "Thousands of medical ethicists and bioethics, as they are called, professionally guide the unthinkable on its passage through the debatable on the way to becoming the justifiable until it is finally established as the unexceptionable."

Reviving Hope In A Dispirited Generation

2009-03-13T11:55:00.000-06:00

"Tell people only what they must do, and you will numb them into despair; you will turn the gospel into a shabby replica of the world's irreligious and nagging moralism, with its oceanfuls of good advice. But tell them what they are, of their dignity as made in the image of God, and that their sins are wicked perversions of their nature; . . . tell them that the world with all its horrors is still God's world, though its true order is upside down; tell them that they can do all things through Christ, because in him all the powers of their nature are directed to fruition . . . and you will help to revive hope in this dispirited generation."

St. Paul's, Canon V.A. Demant in his book Christian Polity

The Lunch Room

2009-02-17T18:29:00.001-06:00

A Bit Of Laughter in The Midst Of So Many Serious Things

2009-02-10T23:01:00.001-06:00

Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed

2009-02-10T01:03:00.011-06:00

I just finished spending some of the most satisfying moments watching a documentary: "Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed", a film by Ben Stein on science, Darwin, and the possibility of an Intelligent Design of the Universe. Available on iTunes, rent/buy or available on DVD at Amazon. DO NOT MISS IT! I would steak whatever reputation I have on this recommendation.

Heresy!

2009-02-10T00:58:00.004-06:00

A partial insight whose seductive simplicity is altogether more plausible than the whole truth.
T.S.Eliot

“Christian Sensibility.”

2009-02-07T02:00:00.001-06:00

It is the sensibility of the pilgrim through time who resolutely resists the temptation to despair in the face of history's disappointments and tragedies, and just as resolutely declines the delusion of having arrived at history's end.

Once Upon a Time We Knew What To Do

2009-02-06T15:27:00.002-06:00

A British district officer was told by the locals that in Hindu culture it was the custom to cremate a widow on her husband's funeral pyre. He replied that in British culture it was the custom to hang chaps who did that sort of thing. There are many great things about India - but that custom was not one of them. What a pity we're no longer capable of being 'judgmental' and 'discriminating'."

Doctor... I need an abortion..

2009-02-04T10:41:00.003-06:00

A worried woman went to her gynecologist and said: Doctor, I have a serious problem and desperately need your help! My baby is not even 1 yr. old and I'm pregnant again. I don't want kids so close together.'

So the doctor said: 'Ok and what do you want me to do?' She said: 'I want you to end my pregnancy, and I'm counting on your help with this.'

The doctor thought for a little, and after some silence he said to the lady: 'I think I have a better solution for your problem. It's less dangerous for you too.'She smiled, thinking that the doctor was going to accept her request.

Then he continued: 'You see, in order for you not to have to take care of 2 babies at the same time, let's kill the one in your arms. This way, you could rest some before the other one is born. If we're going to kill one of them, it doesn't matter which one it is. There would be no risk for your body if you chose the one in your arms.

The lady was horrified and said: 'No doctor! How terrible! It's a crime to kill a child! 'I agree', the doctor replied. 'But you seemed to be ok with it, so I thought maybe that was the best solution. The doctor smiled, realizing that he had made his point.

He convinced the mom that there is no difference in killing a child that's already been born and one that's still in the womb. The crime is the same!

2009-01-26T17:17:00.001-06:00

2009-01-01T23:43:00.001-06:00

2008-12-30T00:39:00.000-06:00

2008-12-20T19:54:00.001-06:00

Little Murders

2008-12-01T23:22:00.011-06:00

My friend Gil Bailie, of the Cornerstone Forum, sent me the following. It is a letter to the editor of The Tidings, the Los Angeles Archdiocesan newspaper. It puts President elect Obama's support of abortion in stark focus.

No politician in American history has so enthusiastically supported the “right” of parents to hire a professional to kill the child in the mother’s womb as has our next president. If he follows through on his solemn campaign pledges, he will lend legal and political legitimacy to the greatest moral atrocity in history: the killing of millions upon millions of innocent children in the womb. Nothing in history compares with it – either in the number of lives lost or in the innocence and defenselessness of the victims. Worldwide in the last quarter century alone as many as one billion children have been intentionally killed. A tiny fraction of that staggering number have died during the same period in all the wars and all the other forms of violence combined.

What, after all, was the moral monstrosity at the heart of both slavery and the Holocaust? It was that a whole class of human beings were rendered morally and legally invisible and therefore exploitable or expendable at the whim of others. This is the crystal-clear moral center of the abortion issue. Our descendants will recognize this and ask: How could they have let it happen?

Religion & The Public Square

2008-11-28T19:05:00.004-06:00

I received this:

Fr. Mario, no disrespect but politics do not belong in the Church. Politicians are there to govern the country. Priests are there to govern morality. I believe the two should be separate, and I believe that the beliefs of the church can get stronger without the support of the government and vice versa.
---
Please understand, religion is not a private matter between a person and God. When public policies, such as legal abortion, assisted suicide & others, are facilitated by the state, every Christian has a responsibility to raise their voice. To allow public immorality and assaults on human life and dignity, and to remain quiet, would constitute sinful behavior. The fallacy of the above comment is to believe that government actions do not have moral dementions.
Fr. Mario

Over Time And In Layers

2008-11-21T01:24:00.002-06:00

2008-11-17T21:41:00.008-06:00

Even a question not answered, if it is a genuine and honest question, is better than the dull stupidity of someone for whom everything is always quite clear.
Karl Rahner, S.J.

2008-11-07T22:55:00.002-06:00

It may be hard for an egg to turn into a bird: it would be a jolly sight harder for it to learn to fly while remaining an egg. We are like eggs at present. And you cannot go on indefinitely being just an ordinary, decent egg. We must be hatched or go bad.
C.S. Lewis

Rooted in the Christian Tradition

2008-11-04T21:18:00.007-06:00

by Anthony Esolen of Touchstone Magazine

That's how Mr. Obama, quoted by one of our bloggers the other day, has described himself. And I confess I do not know what he can mean by it. If he believes that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, the Savior of the world, who died for our sins, and by whom alone we can be saved (even supposing that those who do not know how to pronounce His name may be saved in ways we cannot fathom), then he is a Christian -- which does not mean that he will be one of those seated at Christ's right hand in the end. That will depend upon whether his faith is alive or locked in death. Same for all the rest of us. The devils believe, and are damned.

Now if you are a Christian, you should say so. Indeed, you must say so, for "he who denies me before men, him also I will deny before my Father." To say, instead, that you are "rooted in the Christian tradition" is rather like Georgetown's saying that they are a "school in the Jesuit tradition." The irony is, of course, that Georgetown is certainly not a school in the Jesuit tradition, if that tradition includes the founder of the Jesuit order, Ignatius of Loyola, and the next three to four centuries of Jesuits who spread the Christian faith across the world. Georgetown is really a school in the Jesuit revolt from Jesuit tradition, a revolt of less than a century's age. It's an odd thing, but nowadays people often invoke the word "tradition" to distance themselves from the reality that gave rise to the tradition in the first place.

The Christian tradition, as everyone here knows, condemns in the strongest possible terms the killing of children in the womb. "Whatsoever you do to the least of these," says Mr. Obama, quoting Jesus, "that you do unto me." Yes, precisely; and what definition of "the least of these," to anyone really rooted in the Christian tradition, rather than rooted in secularism and tinted with the wash of Christian lingo, will not include unborn babies, is hard for me to see. Especially since, according to that same old Christian tradition, our Savior was made flesh in the womb of the Virgin, when Mary said, "Be it done unto me according to thy word." He was not made flesh on the night when he came forth from that womb. That is why that Christian tradition held that John the Baptist leapt in the womb of Elizabeth, as recognizing his Savior -- though Mary could not have been far on in her pregnancy. That is why that Christian tradition assigned its New Year's Day as the day of the Annunciation.

That Christian tradition -- and the explicit instructions of Scripture -- holds that sexual relations are for men and women in marriage, without exceptions. The overturning of that understanding bids fair to destroy the west; I am not talking about sexual sins, but about the refusal to confess that sexual sins even exist. Mr. Obama's own community has been devastated by the sexual revolution. Yet he and his wife have blamed the racism of America, and the stinginess of the federal government, and the greed of the rich, rather than the betrayal of the word of God (and of simple common sense) that is now common to us all, whatever our race or class. Again, I do not know what he can mean by "rooted in the Christian tradition," since the sexual revolution has done all the demons can to tear that tradition up by the roots.

Perhaps "the Christian tradition" means little more than a generalized benevolence, demanded and directed by a vast, mighty, and intrusive central power. Yet I find that vision of the human good (if it be a human good, and not a ghastly parody of it) nowhere in Scripture, nowhere among the writings of the Fathers, nowhere in the lives of the saints.

I do know that the Christian tradition sees patriotism as a form of piety, and as falling under the commandment to honor our father and our mother. That tradition would look with suspicion upon someone who could not bring himself to utter words that place his country under the protection and supervision of God. I wonder, too, what tradition smiles upon seeking patronage from the vilest despisers of one's country. What genuine member of the Jewish faith would seek patronage from an unrepentant Joseph Mengele? But William Ayres and Bernardine Dohrn never did anything as vile as Mengele did. No, probably not. But I will have to let God or Dante judge among the relative vileness of experimenting upon human beings and murdering one's countrymen in an attempt to foment revolution. And as for experimenting upon human beings, the evil Doctor Mengele must be pleased to learn that we will now be creating human life precisely for that purpose.

The last words I will spend on this election are these. That Christian tradition commonly saw Satan's pride as an expression of ingratitude. You see that sin at the heart of Satan's rebellion in Paradise Lost. It is there in the Divine Comedy. Thomas Aquinas talks about it. Now we have two candidates, one of whom I find quite personable on an ordinary and trivial human level (Mr. Obama), and the other of whom seems to me, in his personality, as cuddly as a porcupine. But Mr. McCain was willing to give his life, and came near enough to doing so, to a country that mismanaged the war he fought, and perhaps did not deserve his devotion. Yet he gave that devotion, and he has never had an unkind word to say about America. He loves the country which took so much from him. Mr. Obama, by contrast, has nothing but unkind things to say about the America from which he has received so much. Mr. McCain speaks and acts as if he were in his country's debt. Mr. Obama speaks and acts as if his country were in his debt. There is a name for that attitude, as all children know.

2008-10-28T16:19:00.005-06:00

"The Church does not impose but freely proposes the Catholic faith, well aware that conversion is the mysterious fruit of the action of the Holy Spirit. Faith is a gift and a work of God, and hence excludes any form of proselytism that forces, allures or entices people by trickery to embrace it. A person may open to the faith after mature and responsible reflection, and must be able freely to realise that intimate aspiration. This benefits not only the individual, but all society, because the faithful observance of divine precepts helps to build a more just and united form of coexistence".

--Pope Benedict XVI
Ad Limina Address
to the Bishops of Central Asia
Rome, 2 October 2008

2008-10-25T21:09:00.004-06:00

Lord, take me where You want me to go;
Let me meet who You want me to meet;
Tell me what You want me to say; and
Keep me out of your way.

2008-10-20T22:00:00.001-06:00

There are two kinds of people: those who say to God, "Thy will be done", and those to whom God says, "All right, then, have it your way". -- C.S. Lewis

I'm Sorry, I Just Can't Help Myself!

2008-10-19T21:28:00.008-06:00

I Get By With A Little Help From My Friends

2008-10-18T00:48:00.005-06:00

Click Image to see enlargement.
It's worth it!

Modernity As Confinement

2008-10-14T18:16:00.002-06:00

We insist on the right to be different, and then we claim that the differences make no difference. We give out the license to bed down with whomever we please, and then concede that talk about "love" is only talk about a private, often capricious feeling, even an appetite -- confining it to the person who happens to feel it, for the time wherein the feeling is present.

We pride ourselves upon our independence, who live alone, in dead-bolted apartments, hanged by the neck until half dead with luxuries we don't enjoy and jobs we are not interested in, among people we don't like. Children may come along, those most powerful catapults against the fortresses of our self-sufficiency, but we shoulder them out of the way, and shut them up in some asylum or other where they will be taken care of, for a few hours between confinement and confinement. We have spare time, not leisure; we flee the freedom of not having something "important" to do as if it were a snake offering us the chance to go back to Eden. Our laughter is not the free and openhearted laughter of people caught up in joy; there is nothing "silly" about it in the wonderful old sense of the word, both foolish and blessed at once. Nothing is farther from joy than a snicker.

In the end, there can be no joy so long as we are wrapped in ourselves, and modernity has nothing, nothing at all, with which to pierce that cocoon; instead, it has called the cocoon "self-fulfillment" and has used it as the model for its non-society of separate, lonely, dependable, sleeping larvae. Christ is our Joy -- pure gift, demanding pure, liberating surrender.

Article: Modernity As Confinement

Vote

2008-09-27T20:29:00.001-06:00

I'm A PC

2008-09-23T17:38:00.001-06:00

A New Order Of Religious Freedom

2008-09-14T11:41:00.003-06:00

More than he wanted to be remembered for having been president, Mr. Jefferson wanted to be remembered as the author of the Virginia “Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom.” In the text of the bill he underlined this sentence: “The opinions of men are not the object of civil government, nor under its jurisdiction.” In a republic of free citizens, every opinion, every prejudice, every aspiration, every moral argument has access to the public square in which we deliberate the ordering of our life together.

“The opinions of men are not the object of civil government, nor under its jurisdiction.” And yet civil government is ordered by, and derives its legitimacy from, the opinions of the citizenry. Precisely here do we discover the novelty of the American experiment, the unique contribution of what the Founders called this novus ordo seclorum, a new order for the ages. Never before in human history had any government denied itself jurisdiction, whether limited or total, over that on which it entirely depends, the opinion of its people.

That was the point forcefully made by Lincoln in his dispute with Judge Douglas over slavery. Douglas stubbornly held to the Dred Scott decision as the law of the land. Lincoln had the deeper insight into how this republic was designed to work. “In this age, and this country,” Lincoln said, “public sentiment is every thing. With it, nothing can fail; against it, nothing can succeed. Whoever molds public sentiment, goes deeper than he who enacts statutes, or pronounces judicial decisions. He makes possible the inforcement of these, else impossible.”

The question of religion’s place in the public square is not, first of all, a question of First Amendment law. It is first of all a question of understanding the theory and practice of democratic governance. Citizens are the bearers of opinion, including opinion shaped by or espousing religious belief, and citizens have equal access to the public square. In this representative democracy, the state is forbidden to determine which convictions and moral judgments may be proposed for public deliberation. Through a constitutionally ordered and representative process, the people will deliberate and the people will decide.

In a democracy that is free and robust, an opinion is no more disqualified for being religious than for being atheistic, or psychoanalytic, or Marxist, or just plain dumb. There is, or at least there ought to be, no legal or constitutional question about the admission of religion to the public square; there is only a question about the free and equal participation of citizens in our public business. Religion is not a reified thing that threatens to intrude upon our common life. Religion in public is but the public opinion of those citizens who appeal to religion in public.

As with individual citizens, so also with the associations that citizens form to advance their opinions. Religious institutions may understand themselves to be brought into being by God, as the Catholic Church certainly does understand herself, but for the purposes of this democratic polity they are free associations of citizens. As such, they are guaranteed the same access to the public square as are the citizens who comprise them. It matters not at all that their purpose is to advance religion, any more than it matters that other associations would advance the interests of business or labor or radical feminism or animal rights or whatever.

For purposes of democratic theory and practice, it matters not at all whether these religious associations are large or small, whether they reflect the views of a majority or minority, whether we think their opinions bizarre or enlightened. What opinions these associations seek to advance in order to influence our common life is entirely and without remainder the business of citizens who freely adhere to such associations. It is none of the business of the state. Religious associations, like other associations, give corporate expression to the opinions of people and, as Mr. Jefferson said, “the opinions of men are not the object of civil government, nor under its jurisdiction.”

It is to be feared that those who interpret “the separation of church and state” to mean the separation of religion from public life do not understand the theory and practice of democratic governance. Ours is not a secular form of government, if by secular is meant indifference or hostility to opinions that are thought to be religious in nature. The civil government is as secular as are the people from whom it derives its democratic legitimacy. No more, no less. Indeed a case can be made—and I believe it to be a convincing case—that the very founding principle that removes opinion from the jurisdiction of the state is itself religious in both historical origin and continuing foundation. Put differently, the inspiration for religious freedom, as of other freedoms, is itself religious.

“We hold these truths,” the Founders declared. And when these truths about the “unalienable rights” with which persons are “endowed by their Creator” are no longer firmly held by the American people and robustly advanced in the public square, this experiment will have come to an end. In that unhappy case, this experiment will have turned out to be not a novus ordo seclorum but a temporary respite from humanity’s penchant for tyranny. Yet it is a longstanding fact that secularized elites in our universities and our courts are embarrassed by the inescapably religious nature of this nation’s founding and subsequent history.

Richard John Neuhaus is editor in chief of First Things.

Full Article Here

On The Meaning Of Tattoos

2008-08-29T21:53:00.009-06:00

I see them all the time! Tattoos! Being a student of semiotics, the philosophy of symbols, I ran across this article by R.R. Reno, of First Things magazine, an excellent publication analysing religion in the public square. Even though I would not impute this motivation for every one who gets one, his analysis is piercing and on target in discribing the deepest roots behnd the fashion. Here are a few excerpts. I recommend the whole article. (Link at the bottom.)

Reno states:

"The ability of truth to compel the soul is reinterpreted by our culture of critique as an ideological ploy to mask and advance the interests of power. Thus we are taught that nothing rightly compels devotion of heart and mind.

This kind of 'free' soul is a slave of desires for success, desires for social acceptance, desires for all the goodies that our wealthy economy so efficiently provides, to say nothing of (the) primitive passions. Increasingly uncommitted—free from the limits of marriage, children, faith, devotion, and loyalty—we are more purely and more entirely defined by our social roles as productive workers and eager consumers, and by our passing desires for satisfaction and pleasure. ...is it surprising that in an age with so few binding commitments postmodern men and women seek symbols of permanence etched into their bodies?

The human heart hungers for permanence. We don’t want to be dispersed into endless possibilities; we want to be held responsible for being a particular person. Thus, absent strong cultural forces that encourage and enforce limitations on the will, in the coming decade we will see all sorts of strange self-mutilations and radical commitments of the body. Self-mutilation will provide a powerful symbolic compensation for our inability to commit and bind the soul.

In contrast, the most individual man or woman is the one who cannot do or be otherwise—and that comes from a heart circumcised by convictions that we allow to command our lives."

The Tattoo Fashion

2008-08-21T21:07:00.003-06:00

When you have nothing of worth to say, then say nothing. Lately, I am quiet.

Woe Unto Me If I Preach Not

2008-08-12T22:16:00.005-06:00

The Church Times has an article on a new guide, issued with a view to improving homiletic effectiveness, published by a body that calls itself the College of Preachers. Discouraging. Few churchgoers would deny that preaching can stand improvement, but most of us would argue that the problem is not in the delivery, but in the fact that the preacher has absolutely nothing to say. That makes the emphasis on Rotarian-style "effectiveness" and communication skills all the more beside the point.

Preachers should be open to discussion of their sermons, and should check with experts in their community when referring to technical subjects outside their expertise, a brief guide issued by the College of Preachers suggests. ... Paul Jones, director of the College of Preachers, said on Monday: "For serious-minded preachers who want to test the effectiveness of their sermons, the only way is to ask. Churchgoers should be able to discuss with the preacher the sermon --

In part, that's what blogs are for, Doctor Jones.

-- otherwise it can be words left hanging in the air. The sermon is a dialogue. If the sermon has technical content, say, on climate change or genetic engineering, it would be good to pick up information from experts in the congregation."

If the sermon has technical content on climate change or genetic engineering, the preacher should be beaten (moderately, with a view to brotherly correction) and a Christian desirous of strengthening the Faith should be installed in his place.

Posted by: Diogenes - May. 08, 2007 10:16 AM ET USA

2008-07-25T19:58:00.009-06:00

The sayings of the wise are like goads; like fixed spikes are the topics given by one collector. As to more than these, my son, beware. Of the making of many books there is no end, and in much study there is weariness for the flesh. The last word, when all is heard: Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is man's all. (Ecclessiaties 12:11-13)

I Knew It!

2008-07-16T09:37:00.000-06:00

Everybody Needs Somebody

2008-07-09T15:46:00.000-06:00

Priorities & Options

2008-07-01T20:19:00.000-06:00

Sometimes The Superior Cannot Be Superior

2008-06-12T18:00:00.003-06:00

Holy Trinity, a notable Catholic church in Georgetown, Washington, D.C. in the 1990’s. During Mass, some members of the church stand, while others sit or kneel. They stand in protest over the settled doctrine of their church not to ordain women. They sense they might have the sympathy of their priest as they seek to unsettle and overturn that ancient doctrine. But in making their gesture, they are also signaling their desire to have the doctrines of the church altered by protests and by the staging of sentiments within the congregation. And yet, these good people could simply have walked several blocks and settled themselves in a church that gratified them on both counts: they would have readily found, in the neighborhood, a church that offers women as ministers, and permits doctrine to be established by the congregation itself. What apparently exceeded their imagination was that the people around them in the Mass at Trinity were also the bearers of rights, and the so-called dissenters were threatening now to remove those rights. Chief among them was the right to be part of a Church whose doctrines could not be manipulated or altered by the vote of a local majority. That sense of surety may be, even now, as critical and consoling for the parishioners as the confidence that they are at Church in America, where people are free to vote. But in the Church itself the majority has no sovereignty to assert. As Chesterton put it, the Church is “the only thing in which the superior cannot be superior.” For as John Paul II sought to explain, there were things that even he and the College of Cardinals were not free to change.

By Hadley Arkes who is the Ney Professor of Jurisprudence at Amherst College.

2008-05-26T19:12:00.001-06:00

The first century starts at 0001-01-01 00:00:00 AD, although they did not know it at the time. This definition applies to all Gregorian calendar countries. There is no century number 0, you go from -1 to 1. If you disagree with this, please write your complaint to: Pope, Cathedral Saint-Peter of Roma, Vatican.

Go Directly To God

2008-05-22T18:23:00.002-06:00

It's a risky thing to pray and the danger is that our very prayers get between God and us. The great thing in prayer is not to pray, but to go directly to God.... at the very root of your existence, you are inconstant and immediate contact with the infinite power of God.

A Country Song

2008-05-19T15:39:00.002-06:00

Go Away....

2008-05-17T00:46:00.009-06:00

Go Away......
Leave me alone...

If you have wondered why I have not posted lately,
...I am just experiencing one of my "let the world go away" periods.
With God's help, I will start again sometime soon.
Mario

Worshiping Government

2008-04-21T09:28:00.000-06:00

"It is only by believing in God that we can ever criticise a Government. Once abolish God, and the Government becomes God . . . Wherever the people do not believe in something beyond the world, they will worship the world. But, above all, they will worship the strongest thing in the world.”

G.K. Chesterton

Hope For More Than Is Effectively Attainable At Any Given Time

2008-04-18T22:55:00.000-06:00

All serious and upright human conduct is hope in action. . . . Yet our daily efforts in pursuing our own lives and in working for the world's future either tire us or turn into fanaticism, unless we are enlightened by the radiance of the great hope that cannot be destroyed even by small-scale failures or by a breakdown in matters of historic importance. If we cannot hope for more than is effectively attainable at any given time, or more than is promised by political or economic authorities, our lives will soon be without hope.
Benedict XVI

Designer Creatures

2008-04-17T11:21:00.004-06:00

The central issue that lies at the heart of the so called "culture wars" in current American society is the ultimate nature of the human being. If the human person is envisioned as a product of total chance, an accident, all be it a complex one, then who we are, both individually and collectively, is really left up to our own choosing. This "radical autonomy," (meaning there is no law except ourselves) holds essentially that each of us is an island of self imposed meaning surrounded by the sea of an absurd universe.

Without getting into the fray of the daily battles of the culture wars, Pope Benedict, in his speech at the White House, reminded us that how we answer the question of human identity is, and historically has been, linked to the development of the freedom that we enjoy in our nation. The reason we have "inalienable" rights is because they are given by a Creator over which the human race has no authority or power. The Rights we enjoy are not given by the state, they are merely recognized by it. Were they to be granted by the state, they could also be removed by the state, thus making the word "inalienable" quite meaningless.

The fact is that the bedrock upon which our freedom is based has been in front of our eyes since the Declaration of Independence was crafted. Pope Benedict's words echo that reminder strongly:

"From the dawn of the Republic, America's quest for freedom has been guided by the conviction that the principles governing political and social life are intimately linked to a moral order based on the dominion of God the Creator. The framers of this nation's founding documents drew upon this conviction when they proclaimed the "self-evident truth" that all men are created equal and endowed with inalienable rights grounded in the laws of nature and of nature's God.

The more we make decisions that are not in harmony with our "designed" nature; the more we negate that we are designed creatures with intentional specifications embedded in our very nature by the creator; the more will our individual and social lives malfunction.

If you own an automobile that was designed to run on gasoline, you are technically "free'" to put diesel fuel in it, but do not expect it to function. We are technically "free" to act against our social and individual design, but we should never be surprised when our social and individual lives are a wreck. In order for a creature to function well it must cooperate with the design specifications that have been embedded in its very structure by its creator. That goes for all creatures, from cars to people.

Driving Volvos To Nowhere

2008-04-14T22:24:00.002-06:00

Harry Lewis, former dean of Harvard College, argued that “Harvard teaches students, but it does not make them wise. . . . Harvard articulates no ideals of what it means to be a good person, as opposed to a well person.” David Brooks found that Princeton students—typically brilliant, hardworking, and well-intentioned—had little in the way of a moral vocabulary. Character formation was apparently not included in the college curriculum. And Tom Wolfe, for his part, painted a truly chilling scene of status-conscious striving and exploi-tation, where materialist biology reigns supreme over morality and libidos alike.

The danger, it would seem, is that an entire way of life has been built around we know not what. Those few of us who can afford it have spent countless hours and dollars to mold our children into Harvard’s ideal American youth, but Harvard itself does not seem to know any more about that ideal than we do. We have been driving Volvos to nowhere.

Written by Jordan Hylden, a graduate student at Duke Divinity School, is a Harvard alumnus and a former junior fellow at First Things. Published in First Things, April 2008 issue.

Catholic Loving

2008-04-13T23:43:00.005-06:00

Although public opinion is often focused on the church's "no's"
in matters of morality,
its teachings are really
"a great 'yes'
to the human person,
to our lives and
our capacity to love."

Benedict XVI

Glory and Fame

2008-04-11T10:24:00.005-06:00

“Fame is the sum total of all the misunderstandings
that can gather round a new name.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke, Poet

Catholics are not usually known for being great at "chapter and verse" Bible memorization. There is one New Testament verse that I simply can not forget. It is John, Chapter 5 vs. 44. As quoted in the RSV Bible Jesus says:

"How can you believe when you accept glory from one another, and do not seek the glory that comes from the one who alone is God? "

The word translated as "glory" has its roots from the word in Hebrew which means "weight." In other words, whosoever's opinion holds the most "weight" in your life, it is to that person or entity that you, in fact, give the most "glory".

Whenever you live your life seeking fame or attention primarily from others you are, in effect, seeking the glory of social recognition from them. The strength of your faith will be in direct proportion to the "weight" that you give to God's opinions of you and the weight that pleasing Him holds in making the decisions of your life.

I learned a long time ago that "You have to live your life for an audience of ONE."

2008-03-27T00:12:00.005-06:00

"The true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him."
- G.K. Chesterton

A Muslim Converts

2008-03-24T22:00:00.009-06:00

First Things Blog
Posted by Spengler on March 24, 2008

The world is now discussing Magdi Cristiano Allam’s baptism by Pope Benedict XVI during the Easter Vigil at St. Peter’s. Osama bin Laden recently accused Benedict of plotting a new Crusade against Islam, and instead finds something far more powerful: faith the size of a mustard seed that can move mountains. The faith of a single human being well may have changed the course of great events. Since 9/11 the leaders of the West have searched for a “moderate Islam” to counter radical Islamism, without however encountering a single prominent Muslim willing to unequivocally repudiated terrorism, wife-beating, the stoning of adulteresses and so forth.

Now Magdi Allam, the deputy editor of Italy’s newspaper of record and a bestselling author, tells us that he has found the true God and forsaken an Islam that he regards as inherently violent. Mr. Allam has a powerful voice. For years he was the exemplar of “moderate Islam” in Europe, and now he has decided that Islam cannot be “moderate.” His conversion shifts the agenda to the debate that Benedict opened at Regensburg in September 2006 over faith and reason, in opposition to arbitrary submission and violence. Before Benedict’s election, I summarized his stance as “I have a mustard seed and I’m not afraid to use it.” Now we are seeing what faith can accomplish.

Mr. Allam abandoned Islam, he explains, because the religion is violent as a matter by its nature:

"My conversion to Catholicism is the touching down of a gradual and profound interior meditation from which I could not pull myself away, given that for five years I have been confined to a life under guard, with permanent surveillance at home and a police escort for my every movement, because of death threats and death sentences from Islamic extremists and terrorists, both those in and outside of Italy.

I had to ask myself about the attitude of those who publicly declared fatwas, Islamic juridical verdicts, against me—I who was a Muslim—as an “enemy of Islam,” “hypocrite because he is a Coptic Christian who pretends to be a Muslim to do damage to Islam,” “liar and vilifier of Islam,” legitimating my death sentence in this way. I asked myself how it was possible that those who, like me, sincerely and boldly called for a “moderate Islam,” assuming the responsibility of exposing themselves in the first person in denouncing Islamic extremism and terrorism, ended up being sentenced to death in the name of Islam on the basis of the Quran. I was forced to see that, beyond the contingency of the phenomenon of Islamic extremism and terrorism that has appeared on a global level, the root of evil is inherent in an Islam that is physiologically violent and historically conflictive. (emphasis added)"

But it was not recognition that “the root of evil is inherent in Islam” that led Mr. Allam to the Church, but Pope Benedict XVI’s defense of faith and reason, as he recounts:

"But undoubtedly the most extraordinary and important encounter in my decision to convert was that with Pope Benedict XVI, whom I admired and defended as a Muslim for his mastery in setting down the indissoluble link between faith and reason as a basis for authentic religion and human civilization, and to whom I fully adhere as a Christian to inspire me with new light in the fulfillment of the mission God has reserved for me.

Benedict’s message is “revolutionary,” Mr. Allam added. Many converts to Christianity from Islam now may step out of the shadows, and the Church may abandon its undue prudence about proselytizing in Muslim lands:

His Holiness has sent an explicit and revolutionary message to a Church that until now has been too prudent in the conversion of Muslims, abstaining from proselytizing in majority Muslim countries and keeping quiet about the reality of converts in Christian countries. Out of fear. The fear of not being able to protect converts in the face of their being condemned to death for apostasy and fear of reprisals against Christians living in Islamic countries. Well, today Benedict XVI, with his witness, tells us that we must overcome fear and not be afraid to affirm the truth of Jesus even with Muslims.

"For my part, I say that it is time to put an end to the abuse and the violence of Muslims who do not respect the freedom of religious choice. In Italy there are thousands of converts to Islam who live their new faith in peace. But there are also thousands of Muslim converts to Christianity who are forced to hide their faith out of fear of being assassinated by Islamic extremists who lurk among us. By one of those “fortuitous events” that evoke the discreet hand of the Lord, the first article that I wrote for the Corriere on Sept. 3, 2003 was entitled “The new Catacombs of Islamic Converts.” It was an investigation of recent Muslim converts to Christianity in Italy who decry their profound spiritual and human solitude in the face of absconding state institutions that do not protect them and the silence of the Church itself. Well, I hope that the Pope’s historical gesture and my testimony will lead to the conviction that the moment has come to leave the darkness of the catacombs and to publicly declare their desire to be fully themselves."

What the outcome will be of the evangelization of Muslims lies beyond all speculation: that is a matter of every soul’s relationship to God. But the global agenda has changed, not through the machinations of statesmen or the word-mincing of public intellectuals, but through the soul of a single man. Benedict’s Regensburg challenge to Islam now demarcates the encounter between the West and the Muslim world, and nothing will be the same.

God's Gift Of Humor

2008-03-24T21:32:00.003-06:00

Denials and Consequences

2008-03-23T00:49:00.009-06:00

Do you know what happens when Easter is
celebrated without Good Friday?

You get...

.............................the Easter Bunny!

Approaching Death

2008-03-21T19:16:00.001-06:00

A Christian friend for whom life in the body is becoming more difficult and tenuous has been thinking on death’s uncongeniality. What disturbs him is not simply that there is so much sweetness in a life he is loathe to leave--he has a wonderful wife, a large and loving family, and the high respect of many friends and colleagues--but (for he is a penetrating man) the impenetrability of the veil through which we must pass. It is not the depth or speed of the River at the World's End that troubles him so much as the mists that obscure the other side.

The thickest of these is the incommensurability of that new world with ours, something the Lord spoke of when he taught that there will be no marrying or giving in marriage, but we will be like the angels in heaven. What will be the use of the organs of procreation in a world where we no longer procreate? Or for that matter any organ--the eyes that see, the ears that hear, and the mind into which thoughts enter--but not of what the Lord has prepared for those who love him. Will all that we have here, as it survives resurrection and judgment, have no more than something like “symbolic” value sub specie aeternitatis?

Life in the womb also was acclimating, but similarly devoid of understanding. Not that the sounds of what was outside weren’t dimly heard in the secret place where consciousness was being founded, but all externalities were delivered to us under the beat of our mother's heart, and when we heard her songs or our father's voice, we heard them truly, but did not know yet what they were. It was perceived as "through a mirror, obscurely." We were alive, but only partly awake; the differentiated “I” was there but could not see itself clearly.

That there was a world outside could be no more than an intuition which we hadn’t yet sufficient knowledge to desire. We had mouths, but knew nothing of eating; we had lungs but did not breathe. We had organs of digestion and reproduction, but they were not used as such, and had we the ability to wonder about them, we could only question what use they could be in any future eventuality. We were fully supported in our mother's life, its organ of transmission central to our existence, life without it inconceivable. Her womb formed the horizon of our world, beyond which all was no more than the merest adumbration of myth. As restrictive as it may have become near the end of our residency, we had no desire to leave it.

What we now see retrospectively as birth was death to that child--a sudden and horrific upheaval in which we were forced unwilling through a narrow place and made to take the air of the new world because there was no choice. In terrible light and the new presence of vivid sound the placenta was torn away--all that had carried our former life was now gone, organs once dormant now sustained life: the mouth took in nourishment, the viscera digested and expelled. We were no longer what we had been, but were in a position to come to the knowledge of what it would have meant if we had been told that in this resurrection there was no longer life as we knew it in the womb, but we would be like men on the earth, eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage--all beyond our understanding while we were still resting in our mothers’ bodies.

We should not believe that when the Lord said one must become as a little child if he would enter the Kingdom of God he meant only that childlike trust in him was necessary. He meant that, to be sure, but a great deal more. We note that he did not respond to Nicodemus’ question about entering his mother’s womb a second time with a simple negative, rather with an explanation of the phenomenon of birth that comprehended the whole. The rabbi’s metaphor was apt, but only as metaphor. We could say his mistake was in misapprehending the mother in whom the man of the spirit is gestated, for the second birth, the second coming to the light, is that of a new man to Another Light, by which we will--and only when we can see by it--understand what can now be to us no more than the faintest of glimmerings. This should not dismay us; it is what God intends.

Posted by S. M. Hutchens at 11:52 AM | Permalink

The Agony

2008-03-21T00:34:00.001-06:00

Philosophers have measured mountains,
Fathomed the depths of seas, of states, and kings,
Walked with a staff to heaven, and traced fountains:
But there are two vast, spacious things
The which to measure it doth more behoove:
Yet few there are that sound them: Sin and Love.

Who would know Sin, let him repair
Unto Mount Olivet; there shall he see
A man so wrung with pains that all his hair,
His skin, his garments bloody be.
Sin is that press and vice, that forceth pain
To hunt his cruel food through every vein.

Who knows not Love, let him assay
And taste that juice, which on the cross a pike
Did set again abroach; then let him say
If ever he did taste the like.
Love is that liquor sweet and most divine
Which my God feels as blood; but I, as wine.

George Herbert (1639)

No Dull Passion

2008-03-20T17:08:00.003-06:00

Kairos Journal today posts an article on Empty Churches and the Dull Dogma of Christianity?, quoting from Dorothy Sayers' Letters to a Diminished Church, including this:

It is the dogma that is the drama—not beautiful phrases, nor comforting sentiments, nor vague aspirations to loving-kindness and uplift, nor the promise of something nice after death—but the terrifying assertion that the same God who made the world, lived in the world and passed through the grave and gate of death. Show that to the heathen, and they may not believe it; but at least they may realize that here is something that man might be glad to believe.

It's bad enought give a child a stone instead of bread, but the liturgical equivalent of an Easter bunny instead of the Risen Lord?

Deciphering the Mind of God

2008-03-17T11:07:00.007-06:00

When contemplating the universe, the question imposes itself: Does the universe need to have a cause? It is clear that causal explanations are a vital part of the scientific method. Various processes in the universe can be displayed as a succession of states in such a way that the preceding state is a cause of the succeeding one. If we look deeper at such processes, we see that there is always a dynamical law prescribing how one state should generate another state. But dynamical laws are expressed in the form of mathematical equations, and if we ask about the cause of the universe we should ask about a cause of mathematical laws. By doing so we are back to the Great Blueprint of God’s thinking the universe. The question of ultimate causality is translated into another of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s questions (a seventeenth-century German mathematician and philosopher) : “Why is there something rather than nothing?” (from his Principles of Nature and Grace). When asking this question, we are not asking about a cause like all other causes. We are asking about the root of all possible causes.

When thinking about science as deciphering the Mind of God, we should not forget that science is also a collective product of human brains, and the human brain is itself the most complex and sophisticated product of the universe. It is in the human brain that the world’s structure has reached its focal point—the ability to reflect upon itself. Science is but a collective effort of the Human Mind to read the Mind of God from the question marks out of which we and the world around us seem to be made. To place ourselves in this double entanglement is to experience that we are a part of the Great Mystery. Another name for this Mystery is the Humble Approach to reality—the motto of all John Templeton Foundation activities. True humility does not consist in pretending that we are feeble and insignificant, but in the audacious acknowledgement that we are an essential part of the Greatest Mystery of all—of the entanglement of the Human Mind with the Mind of God.

Michael (Michał) Heller is a Polish cosmologist and Catholic priest. This is a portion of remarks that were made at the news conference announcing his reception of the 2008 Templeton Prize.

Full text of the talk can be found at First Things: On The Square blog. Entry date 3/17/08.
http://www.firstthings.com/onthesquare/?p=997

Lent - How Did It Go?

2008-03-16T14:12:00.002-06:00

The Life We Long For Is Not An Indefinite Prolongation Of Time

2008-03-10T22:59:00.011-06:00

Pope Benedict used a pastoral visit to a Rome parish on March 9th as an opportunity to speak on life after death and the human quest for immortality.

Unlike other biological creatures, the Pope explained, man by nature seeks after understanding about the meaning of his own existence. "He thirsts for knowledge of the infinite, he wishes to arrive at the font of life and to drink therefrom, to find life itself."

Alongside that search for knowledge, the Pope continued, man also feels the need for relationships with others: for love. "And it is here," the Pontiff noted, "that man comes close to the source of life."

The medical sciences might do their best to preserve life, the Pontiff said, but by themselves they cannot raise man above the level of biological existence. The immortality that we seek is not only the indefinite prolongation of life, he reasoned, because we do not want to grow older forever and see the world age around us.

The immortality that all men seek, the Pope concluded, is "communion with this infinite love which is the source of life." The Church extends that possibility to mankind, he said, in the Eucharist, which the early Church fathers called the "medicine of immortality."

What About Abstinence?

2008-03-08T20:58:00.003-06:00

I was holding a notice from my 13-year-old son's school announcing a meeting to preview the new course in sexuality. Parents could examine the curriculum and take part in an actual lesson presented exactly as it would be given to the students.

When I arrived at the school, I was surprised to discover only about a dozen parents there. As we waited for the presentation, I thumbed through page after page of instructions in the prevention of pregnancy or disease. I found abstinence mentioned only in passing.

When the teacher arrived with the school nurse, she asked if there were any questions. I asked why abstinence did not play a noticeable part in the material. What happened next was shocking.

There was a great deal of laughter, and someone suggested that if I thought abstinence had any merit, I should go back to burying my head in the sand. The teacher and the nurse said nothing as I drowned in a sea of embarrassment. My mind had gone blank, and I could think of nothing to say. The teacher explained to me that the job of the school was to teach "facts" and the home was responsible for moral training. I sat in silence for the next 20 minutes as the course was explained. The other parents seemed to give their unqualified support to the materials.

"Donuts at the back," announced the teacher during the break. "I'd like you to put on the name tags we have prepared. They're right by the donuts and mingle with the other parents." Everyone moved to the back of the room. As I watched them affixing their name tags and shaking hands, I sat deep in thought. I was ashamed that I had not been able to convince them to include a serious discussion of abstinence in the materials. I uttered a silent prayer for guidance.

My thoughts were interrupted by the teacher's hand on my shoulder. "Won't you join the others, Mr. Layton?" The nurse smiled sweetly at me. "The donuts are good!" "Thank you, no," I replied. "Well, then, how about a name tag? I'm sure the others would like to meet you." "Somehow I doubt that," I replied. "Won't you please join them?" she coaxed. Then I heard a still, small voice whisper, "Don't go." The instruction was unmistakable. "Don't go!" "I'll just wait here," I said.

When the class was called back to order, the teacher looked around the long table and thanked everyone for putting on name tags. She ignored me. Then she said, "Now we're going to give you the same lesson we'll be giving your children. Everyone please peel off your name tags." I watched in silence as the tags came off. "Now, then, on the back of one of the tags, I drew a tiny flower. Who has it, please?" The gentleman across from me held it up. "Here it is!" "All right," she said. "The flower represents disease. Do you recall with whom you shook hands?" He pointed to a couple of people. "Very good," she replied. "The handshake in this case is intimacy. So the two people you had contact with now have the disease."

There was laughter and joking among the parents. The teacher continued, "And with whom did the two of YOU shake hands?" The point was well taken, and she explained how this lesson would show students how quickly disease is spread. "Since we all shook hands, we all have the disease."

It was then that I heard the still, small voice again. "Speak now," it said, "but be humble." I noted wryly the latter admonition, then rose from my chair. I apologized for any upset I might have caused earlier, congratulated the teacher on an excellent lesson that would impress the youth, and concluded by saying I had only one small point I wished to make.

"Not all of us were infected," I said.

"One of us ABSTAINED."

Written by Robert Layton
http://www.joyfulministry.com/abstain.htm

Makes Perfect Sense!

2008-03-06T20:34:00.003-06:00

Irony And A Pile Of Purple Hair

2008-03-03T21:35:00.012-06:00

An interesting recollection from Matthew J. Milliner, a Ph.D. candidate at Princeton University.

The quote is part of the entry "Crazy For God" Published in First Things' blog "On The Square."
http://www.firstthings.com/onthesquare/?p=985

"It was an academic conference in Dallas, a first trip to Texas for myself, a native northeasterner. As I zoomed from the airport in my rented Chevy, the colossal lone-star flags, highways named after George Bush, and the chintzy yet imperial whitewashed megachurches invited me, as if into an exotic, forbidden land. As I neared Dallas, an aura of urbanity took over, and I was more at home. But on the way back to the airport—just outside the Dallas sophistication circumference—there it all was again. Though I had a flight to catch, I couldn’t resist the urge to pull off the highway, my aim being to capture a photo of the megachurch—a fitting illustration of bad architecture. I glided off the exit ramp into the acres of asphalt parking lot, empty at the time, and a lone man gave me a friendly wave. I passed him and looked closer at the church sign. In a flash I realized my good fortune. I had come across nothing less than the studio and worship center of the Trinity Broadcasting Network. My heart leapt with ironic delight.

This was possibly the gaudiest example of American Christianity in existence, and I was here to see it. As TBN piped into the free cable in the dorms of Princeton Theological Seminary, I had spent years mocking it, as had most of the students. TBN was everything we were learning not to be. I actually called a seminary friend to tell him where I was, and we cackled with laughter. This was the domain of the legendary television preacher’s wife, that woman with the pile of purple hair.

Next to the TBN church was a prototype of the “Family Christian” store chain, a store on which I had once, years ago, seen a sign reading, “Bible Man appearance cancelled due to injury.” On the other side was a prefab neo-classical building with “Happy Birthday Jesus” still (it was nearly March) strung up in lights. A “virtual reality” tour of the television studio was advertised in front of an inexcusably awful statue. It was a photographic jackpot; like a shark circling its prey, I ringed the lot for the right angle. Then I saw it. The perfect shot would be one that showed the Toys ’R’ Us sign across the highway just under the Trinity Broadcasting Network Sign. How deliciously subversive. I was so excited about this picture that, exiting my car and running to get the right angle, I slipped and fell. I got up to take the shot, but my camera batteries had run out. I panicked. I leapt into the car to rush to a convenience store (I still had the flight to catch), but I had left my cell phone on the roof. I remembered just before it fell off.

At a stoplight on the way to the store that I never found, I looked up to a congress of ravens, so thick they seemed to blanket the telephone poles, and there the realization came. I had literally fallen over myself to make fun of a branch of Christianity that—I knew from personal experience—could transform lives. Yes, only an insider can know the ugly secrets of American evangelicalism. But what’s more, and what made mine more of betrayal, is that only an insider can know how much of it is undeniably good, sometimes even mystically so. I was such an insider, and rather than cherish and protect my memory of evangelicalism, I was willing to portray it in the worst possible light for some laughs.

I thought about how I must have looked to the cars passing on the highway, or to the lone man who—not realizing I was here to mock his church—gave me that wave. Some guy from New Jersey, after erratically circling a parking lot, leapt out of his car, scampered, slipped, fell, got up, and then drove off with his cell phone on the roof of a compact Chevy. Others came there to serve God, but I was serving my generation’s idol: irony. A pile of purple hair was a respectable alternative to the sight of me."

Matthew J. Milliner is a Ph.D. candidate at Princeton University.
He blogs at millinerd.com.

Clericalism

2008-02-29T01:24:00.000-06:00

Clericalism is the shadowed side of Catholicism’s high view of Christian ministry. It confuses the priest’s sacramentally acting in persona Christi with priestly prerogative and immunity from criticism. It is the shadowed side that largely explains the patterns of denial, deceit, and evasion that produced the sex-abuse crisis in the first place, including the pattern of bishops who say, and in many cases may sincerely believe, that their “ministry of unity” takes priority over living in the truth.

We Cannot Read Our Way To The Kingdom Of Heaven

2008-02-14T08:54:00.002-06:00

Even the best books that convey the most reliable truths are not perfect. We cannot read our way to the Kingdom of Heaven. Golden books, whether great, semi-great, or unique to our strange intellectual and spiritual circumstances, are never pure. Only one book is without imperfection. But the Bible is not really a book at all. Golden books guide the mind and excite our desire for truth. The Bible does surgery on our soul. It shimmers with the living presence of the divine Word. We do not so much read as hear it. And in hearing, the sacred page does what no human book can do. It pierces our minds and hearts, cutting to the joints and marrow of our thoughts and intentions (Heb. 4:12). >

Beware, then, reading solely for agreement. Few think their ideas to the end. Few write with the penetrating clarity necessary to see what is at stake in the beliefs we accept and reject. To see and know the full power and attraction of falsehood may be a necessary preparation for more fully accepting the truth. I do not deny that, in the end, beauty is one with truth and goodness. But in this life we are almost always a long way from the end.

People Sure Of What God Wants

2008-02-10T14:08:00.001-06:00

"I distrust those people who know so well what God wants because I notice it always coincides with their own desires.

Susan B Anthony

Prepared To Be Catholic

2008-02-09T13:30:00.001-06:00

“I am afraid to make hasty converts of educated men,” Newman wrote in 1863, “lest they should not have counted the cost & should have difficulties after they have entered the Church. . . . The Church must be prepared for converts, as well as converts prepared for the Church.”

tags: links, read

Think!

2008-01-28T11:13:00.001-06:00

"I do not believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reasons, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use."

-Galileo Galilei

An Atheism Of Sorrow

2008-01-25T19:15:00.000-06:00

Father Ranier Cantalamessa, preacher to the papal household, in a recent essay:
“The world of today knows a new category of people: the atheists in good faith, those who live painfully the situation of the silence of God, who do not believe in God but do not boast about it; rather they experience the existential anguish and the lack of meaning of everything: They too, in their own way, live in the dark night of the spirit. Albert Camus called them “the saints without God.” The mystics exist above all for them; they are their travel and table companions. Like Jesus, they “sat down at the table of sinners and ate with them” (see Luke 15:2). This explains the passion with which certain atheists, once converted, pore over the writings of the mystics: Claudel, Bernanos, the two Maritains, L. Bloy, the writer J.K. Huysmans and so many others over the writings of Angela of Foligno; T.S. Eliot over those of Julian of Norwich. There they find again the same scenery that they had left, but this time illuminated by the sun. . . . The word “atheist” can have an active and a passive meaning. It can indicate someone who rejects God, but also one who—at least so it seems to him—is rejected by God. In the first case, it is a blameworthy atheism (when it is not in good faith), in the second an atheism of sorrow or of expiation.”

Think It Through.

2008-01-24T22:40:00.000-06:00

A Theologians job is to make sure that if Christian Faith is rejected, it is rejected for authetic reasons.

My Hierarchy of Values: God, People, Apple and Starbucks!

2008-01-22T00:09:00.000-06:00

My Favorite Prayer

2008-01-19T23:38:00.000-06:00

“My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you. And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing. I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire. And I know that if I do this you will lead me by the right road, though I may know nothing about it. Therefore I will trust you always though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death. I will not fear, for you are ever with me, and you will never leave me to face my perils alone.”
Thomas Merton

The Task Of The Parish

2008-01-18T22:48:00.000-06:00

More than a century ago, Cardinal Newman, the great leader of Catholicism's revival in England, said, "I want a laity ... who know their faith, who enter into it, who know just where they stand, who know what they hold and what they do not, who know their creed so well that they can give an account of it and who know enough of history to defend it. I want an intelligent, well-instructed laity." My hope is that every Catholic will be able to articulate their faith in convincing and intelligent ways, and show by their living example the compelling truth of the Gospel and church teaching.
Cardinal John Henry Neuman

Hope In Action

2008-01-18T20:41:00.000-06:00

Think Different

2008-01-13T21:57:00.001-06:00

Well Said!

2008-01-12T20:26:00.001-06:00

There is no need to glorify a pope in order to live with him in peace and obedience.

Karl Rahner

The Evil Eye!!!

2007-12-26T21:10:00.000-06:00

http://view.break.com/422660 - Watch more free videos

The Peril And Possibility of Peace

2007-12-24T14:32:00.000-06:00

In the Greco-Roman world “savior” was a title bestowed upon kings and rulers who brought peace and prosperity to their realms. In particular, the emperor Augustus, in whose reign Jesus was born, was acclaimed paradigm savior on the grounds that his rule had brought peace—or at least the absence of war—to the entire world.

In the brief Gloria canticle at the birth of Jesus, a multitude of the heavenly army signal the birth of a Savior bringing peace of a different kind: "Glory to God in the highest heaven, and on earth peace to those who enjoy God’s favor." This is not another offer of peace on the worlds terms...

Christians know that in this world a totally and permanently peaceful human society is unfortunately a utopia, and that ideologies that hold up that prospect as easily attainable are based on hopes that cannot be realized, whatever the reason behind them. It is a question of a mistaken view of the human condition, a lack of application in considering the question as a whole; or it may be a case of evasion in order to calm fear, or in still other cases a matter of calculated self-interest. Christians are convinced, if only because they have learned from personal experience, that these deceptive hopes lead straight to the false peace of totalitarian regimes.
MESSAGE OF HIS HOLINESSPOPE JOHN PAUL II
FOR THE CELEBRATION OF THE DAY OF PEACE

The Gospel is not setting Jesus as Savior over against the civil power (Rome, the US or any other source of power) in a hostile sense. But by placing the birth of Jesus within this context it claims the notions of salvation and peace for the divine project now under way. The true peace for which the world longs can only flow from the divine favor which the ministry of Jesus will unleash.

When you sense that specialness, the "something in the air" of Christmas, what you are experiencing are the first echoes of that divine hope. The hope that there is an actual and realistic possibility that the Peace for which we long, that Peace which is beyond our power to engeneer has been offered to humanity, and in Jesus has been accepted by humanity. We who live and die in Christ await, even in the midst of turmoil, Gods Peace to become the normal state of humanity when His Kingdom is brought to its fulfillment.

In this and in every age the coming of the real Savior remains a sign of joy and hope “for all the people.”

Fear Of Faith

2007-12-22T09:29:00.000-06:00

In the twentieth century, the response to fear-filled religiosity has been atheism and fear-filled alienation from all things spiritual. Alienation may be a sixties word, but it's by no means a sixties concept. It is, after all, just a name for that basic atavistic feeling of not being "at home" in the world, a kind of cosmic homesickness. It was not born in the twentieth century, but it was certainly fed by existential philosophy and the denial of the existence of God.

Jean-Paul Satre celebrated this terrible emptiness: "Life has no meaning... It is up to you to give it a meaning, and value is nothing but the meaning that you choose." As the philosopher William Barrett puts it, "Satre's atheism states candidly ... that man is an alien in the universe, unjustified and unjustifiable, absurd in the simple sense that there is no...reason sufficient to explain why he or his universe exists."

Wow, if I thought that was the whole truth about our universe, I'd be pretty alienated and afraid and bummed out, too. And no amount of Satre and intellectual muscle-flexing would assuage my fears. Engaging in nonstop activity so I didn't have to think about it would at least push my fear to the background. But I wouldn't be getting rid of it - only masking it.

Sometimes the fear manifests as an anxiety that hangs over us, one that we cannot ascribe to any particular event. "Free-floating anxiety" is the term used by modern psychology, and by naming what we cannot explain by classifying the symptoms, we delude ourselves into thinking we somehow mastered the cause. Many years ago I read a column by a successful playwright recounting a day in his life that would be the envy of many, full of people and color and action and fun. I no longer remember his name, but his last line was burned into my brain: "I go to bed every night thinking that I have forgotten something." The nagging sensation of having forgotten something important, which disturbs our comfort and routine, both feeds our fear and is a product of it.

So for many the price of escaping from the prison of damnation-drenched religious conventions has been to lose touch with the spiritual truths from which they originally sprang. When that happens, our new reality is the fear-filled and barren terrain of sterile secular humanism. It's a false world in which the spiritual either gets taken over by fanatical fundamentalism or explained away by psychoanalysis as the residue of a damaged childhood. Indeed, one of Freud's most famous books about religion is entitled The Future of an Illusion.

Without faith in a higher order and the existence of something outside ourselves and our everyday lives, life can become emotionally unbearable and filled with fear. And this anxiety, even if we're not aware of it, will surface in other parts of our lives. Bernard Levin described it as "the gnawing feeling that ultimate reality lies elsewhere, glimpsed out of the corner of the eye, sensed just beyond the light cast by the campfire, heard in the slow movement of a Mozart quartet, seen in the eyes of Rembrandt's last self-portraits, felt in the sudden stab of discovery in reading or seeing a Shakespeare play thought familiar in every line."

But we spend a large part of our lives barricading ourselves against this ultimate reality. In the nineteenth century, Nietzsche called himself "a man who wishes nothing more than daily to lose some reassuring belief, who seeks and finds his happiness in this daily greater liberation of the mind." But the freedom he was seeking, which was essentially the freedom from fear and convention, cannot be found through the mind, only through the soul.

This excerpt was originally published in On Becoming Fearless In Love, Work, And Life by Arianna Huffington.

Daily Life for St. Augustine

2007-12-12T08:35:00.000-06:00

St. Augustine once described his daily life in the following terms: “The turbulent have to be corrected, the faint-hearted cheered up, the weak supported; the Gospel's opponents need to be refuted, its insidious enemies guarded against; the unlearned need to be taught, the indolent stirred up, the argumentative checked; the proud must be put in their place, the desperate set on their feet, those engaged in quarrels reconciled; the needy have to be helped, the oppressed to be liberated, the good to be encouraged, the bad to be tolerated; all must be loved.”

Hope Capable of Filling the Vacuum

2007-12-12T08:30:00.000-06:00

Christianity spread through the ancient world in part because of the hope it awakened in a world engulfed in crisis. As the revelation of the Cross was freeing humanity from the spellbinding power of sacred violence and the myths and rituals that perpetuated it, the Resurrection was opening up a panorama of hope invulnerable to worldly disappointments. At the very moment when civil order seemed to be dissolving, and the barbarians were closing in on its besieged outposts, Christians – St. Augustine prominent among them – bore witness to a hope unlike anything the surrounding pagan world had ever known. In the 21st century, under similar circumstances, it will fall to those directly or indirectly inspired by Christianity to recover a hope capable of filling the vacuum left by the collapse of modernity’s naïve optimism, on one hand, and postmodernity’s erudition of despair, on the other.
Gil Bailie

When I Say "I am a Christian."

2007-11-26T17:53:00.000-06:00

When I say... I am a Christian,"
I'm not shouting "I'm clean livin'."
I'm whispering "I was lost,
but now I'm found and forgiven."

When I say.. I am a Christian,"
I don't speak of this with pride.
I'm confessing that I tumble,
and need Christ to be my guide.

When I say... I am a Christian,"
I'm not trying to be strong.
I'm professing that I'm weak,
and need His strength to carry on.

When I say... I am a Christian,"
I'm not bragging of success.
I'm admitting I have failed
and need God to clean my mess.

When I say... I am a Christian,"
I'm not claiming to be perfect,
My flaws are far too visible,
but God believes I am worth it.

When I say... I am a Christian,"
I still feel the sting of pain.
I have my share of heartaches,
so I call upon His name.

When I say... I am a Christian,"
I'm not holier than thou,
I'm just a simple sinner
who received God's good grace, somehow!

Poem by Maya Angelou

God Is Soooo Slow

2007-11-22T13:01:00.001-06:00

"Perhaps the most difficult struggle in the Christian life is with the slowness of God. Have you found that out? How absolutely incredibly slow he is at times! Do you get as impatient with him as I do? Why, there are times when I can see as clear as daylight how he ought to act! I can outline the steps for him---and I do! I tell him just what to do. And it would all work out if he would just take those steps. But he utterly ignores me and goes on doing nothing until I want to rise up and say, "Look, you've got to get off your throne and do something!"

...The Lord tells us that his work is like a farmer going out to sow his seed. The farmer scatters his seed, and then what? Jesus says he goes home and goes to bed-rests, just relaxes and lets the seed grow, because that is the nature of seed. The farmer knows that if he sows the seed and lets it rest---it must go through a certain process involving time; no seed merely drops into the ground and springs up suddenly; no, you must allow it to decay, to deteriorate, to fall apart, and then out of that comes a new life---it will grow slowly and steadily into the air until finally the whole plant is before you. God announces that this is his way of working. And he urges us to understand that the result is certain, and that we can rest patiently, knowing that he is working out his purposes." (Ray C. Stedman, Messages on Ephesians).

The Onion and the Lake of Fire

2007-11-19T20:55:00.001-06:00

Dostoevski, in The Brothers Karamazov, tells a fable about a very wicked woman who died. The devils took her to hell and threw her into the lake of fire. Her guardian angel was very puzzled as to how he might do something to help her. So he thought through her whole life to see if he could find at least one good thing that she had done which he might present before God. Finally he went to God and said, "Once a beggar came by when she was weeding her garden, and she pulled an onion out and gave it to him to eat." God said to the angel, "All right, then you go down and get that onion and hold it out to her in the lake of fire. Tell her to take hold of it, and if you can pull her out with that onion she can come to Paradise."

So the angel took the onion, went down to the lake of fire, and held it out to the woman. She grabbed hold and he began to pull. He pulled and pulled and, sure enough, he began to pull her right up out of the lake. She was almost completely free when some other sinners around her, seeing that she was about to escape, grabbed hold of her ankles so as to be pulled out with her. At first the onion held, and they too began to be pulled out. But the woman became very angry and cried, "This is my onion, and you're not going to go out with me!" And as she kicked them loose the onion broke and she fell back in and she is burning there to this day. (Related by Ray C. Stedman).

Divine Humility

2007-11-12T15:44:00.001-06:00

"It is hardly complimentary to God that we should choose him as an alternative to hell. Yet even this he accepts. The creature's illusion of self-sufficiency must, for the creature's sake, be shattered. And by trouble, or fear of trouble on earth, by crude fear of the eternal flames, God shatters it, unmindful of his glory's diminution. I call this "divine humility," because it's a poor thing to strike our colors to God when the ship is going down under us, a poor thing to come to him as a last resort, to offer up our own when it is no longer worth keeping. If God were proud, he would hardly have us on such terms. But he is not proud. He stoops to conquer. He would have us even though we have shown that we prefer everything else to him, and come to him because there is nothing better now to be had."
(C.S. Lewis)
Enemy-Occupied Territory

The Tithe In Vegas

2007-11-10T17:55:00.000-06:00

A reader tells me that there are more casinos in Las Vegas than Catholic Churches. When the offering is received at Mass, it is common for people to put casino chips rather than cash in the baskets. The several parishes send the collected chips to a neighboring Franciscan Monastery, where they are sorted and then cashed in at the casinos they came from. This weekly task is undertaken by those who are called the chip monks.
I apologize. That is really awful. But I needed one more short item for today’s posting.

Love and Hope

2007-11-07T09:33:00.000-06:00

"To love anyone is to hope in him for always. From the moment at which we begin to judge anyone, to limit our confidence in him, from the moment at which we identify him with what we know of him and so reduce him to that, we cease to love him and he ceases to be able to be better."

- Charles de Foucauld

Sex, Sin, and Salvation

2007-11-05T19:21:00.000-06:00

"Finally, though I have had to speak at some length about sex, I want to make it as clear as I possibly can that the centre of Christian morality is not here. If anyone thinks that Christians regard unchastity as the supreme vice, he is quite wrong. The sins of the flesh are bad, but they are the least bad of all sins. All the worst pleasures are purely spiritual: the pleasure of putting other people in the wrong, of bossing and patronizing and spoiling sport, and back-biting; the pleasures of power, of hatred. For there are two things inside me, competing with the human self which I must try to become. They are the Animal self, and the Diabolical self. The Diabolical self is the worse of the two. That is why a cold, self-righteous prig who goes regularly to church may be far nearer to hell than a prostitute. But, of course, it is better to be neither." (C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity)

Woe to Those Who Call Evil Good

2007-10-29T07:43:00.000-06:00

By Joseph Naumann
Monday, October 29, 2007
Joseph Naumann is the archbishop of Kansas City. These remarks are adapted from a talk he gave at the Gospel of Life Conference in Denver on October 20, 2007.

Mother Teresa, who dedicated her life to serving the poorest of the poor, said on more than one occasion that the greatest poverty in the world was not on the streets of Calcutta but here in the United States and Western Europe. She would say: what a terrible poverty that says: I cannot feed one more child. I cannot clothe one more child. I cannot shelter one more child. I cannot care for one more child. I cannot love one more child.

This is the great poverty that has enveloped our nation these past thirty-five years poverty that amid unprecedented prosperity and wealth places strict limits on our capacity to love.

One of the themes that John Paul II wove through his encyclical The Gospel of Life could be described as the crisis of truth. John Paul believed that objective truth was accessible to everyone through the light of reason. In this, he stood in opposition to many in Western society who question the existence of truth.

For many in our culture today, tolerance and diversity have become the new absolutes. Certainly, there is much good in such values. Tolerance is an important and helpful civic virtue in a democratic society. And it is consistent with Christian teaching.

In fact, as Christians, we are called to do much more than tolerate others who may be different from us in a whole host of ways. We are called to reverence every other human being as one made in the image of God and one the Son of God deemed of such worth that he gave his life on Calvary. This does not mean, however, that every action is to be approved, much less respected. There are some actions and activities that are against the innate dignity of the human person and that infringe on the rights and dignity of others.

The point, here, is that the ideological underpinnings for pro-choice rhetoric derive from the relativism against which the pope complained. It is the crisis of truth that allows otherwise intelligent individuals to posit that they are personally opposed to abortion but they support the right of others to choose an abortion.

The question that needs to be posed to those who make this claim is: Why are you personally opposed to abortion? Why do so many of the pro-choice politicians even say that they want to make abortion rare? Why want to make something rare if it is truly a valid choice? The rhetoric of choice has been a very clever marketing campaign for something that is of its nature evil and repugnant.

While it taps into some deeply held American values of personal freedom and individual liberty, pro-choice position is actually an exercise in illogic. Nobody is actually pro-choice in the sense that they are in favor of all choices. Indeed, one always has to ask the further question: What is being chosen? In the case of abortion, the honest answer is: to destroy a human life.

In some of the inner-city neighborhoods where I served as a priest, there was a great problem with gun violence. Could you imagine anyone saying that they were personally against drive-by shootings, but if someone else wanted to do it they should have that right? Yet it is precisely that illogic that has been used now for several decades to defend the legalization of abortion, the destruction of an innocent human life.

Without the acceptance of objective truth, everything becomes negotiable. The moral conscience of society and the individual are impaired. There is confusion in the recognition of good and evil. We become uncertain about such fundamental institutions for family and society as marriage. From the denial of natural truth, a nihilism emerges that we find expressing itself today in art, literature, and films. We become confused about what is good and noble. We question what is worth devoting our life to. This confusion results in a great interior emptiness. We try to distract ourselves with more and more things, divert our attention with more and more entertainment, and numb ourselves with drugs and other addictions.

I remember watching, as a child, an episode of The Twilight Zone. It began with doctors and nurses with surgical masks gathered around a hospital bed of a female patient whose face was completely bandaged except for her eyes and nose. From their conversation, it became apparent that this woman suffered from a hideous disfigurement which a series of plastic surgeries had failed to correct. They had attempted one final surgery that the doctors were optimistic would solve the problem, but they would not know for certain until they unbandaged her face several days later.

They finally come to the moment of truth. After the unwrapping of the bandages we see that the woman face is stunningly beautiful. The doctors and nurses shake their heads with disappointment and apologize for their failure. For the first time they remove their surgical masks revealing grotesquely hideous features. That is how it is in The Twilight Zone: The beautiful is ugly, and the ugly is beautiful.

This is a helpful image for the consequence of relativism that impairs a culture from recognizing what is objectively good, beautiful, and true. In The Gospel of Life, Pope John Paul had this to say about objective truth: the Gospel of Life is not for believers alone: It is for everyone. The issue of life and its defense and promotion is not a concern of the Christian alone. Although faith provides special light and strength, this question arises in every human conscience which seeks the truth and which cares about the future of humanity. Life certainly has a sacred and religious value, but in no way is that value a concern only of believers. The value at stake is one which every human being can grasp by the light of reason; thus it necessarily concerns everyone.

This battle for the reality and existence of truth is not a new one, although the strength of secular relativism today is undermining the foundations of culture and society in a unique and devastating manner. We can find the battle between truth and its denial right in the Passion, when the accused prisoner, Jesus, asserts: I came into the world to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice, while his earthly judge, Pontius Pilate, feebly responds with the classic relativist question: what is truth?
I prefer to be a disciple of Jesus rather than of Pontius Pilate.

Published in First Things

An Upside Down World

2007-10-22T10:36:00.000-06:00

"As a society, we have our values upside down. Our government creates entire bureaucracies to monitor minute amounts of suspected carcinogens in our food, air, and water---yet it also pays subsidies to farmers for producing one of the worst, most highly cancer-causing substances around: tobacco. We are told we must save the whales, yet we allow unborn babies to be slaughtered at a rate of 3,000 abortions per day. School teachers are allowed to teach witchcraft and New Age philosophy in our public schools, yet the Bible, prayer, and the Ten Commandments are banned. We sentence peaceful pro-life activists to prison and we turn convicted repeat killers and rapists loose on society."
(God's Loving Word: Exploring the Gospel by John by Ray C. Stedman, 1993)