The Ark and The Dove

Things to pass along

Here, I'll help our archbishop disseminate his Lenten pastoral letter. I'll summarize it (albeit somewhat more abruptly) for you here: go to confession.  If you need more encouragement or convincing, here's the text of it.  To show that this is more than just empty words, Archbishop Wuerl has directed priests in the archdiocese to make confession available for a good chunk of time on Wednesday evenings (7:00-8:30).  And he's visiting parishes to hear confessions himself.

As a bonus of sorts, here is this letter from the bishop of Kansas City-St. Joseph that I happened to find the other day, On the Dignity of the Human Person and the Dangers of Pornography, that I'll post just to increase the chances that someone who needs the encouragement will run across it.  By no means is it dry legalistic or puritanical moralizing; it is good Catholic theology and observation on human nature laid out practically and plainly without jargon, biblically rooted, explained sensitively but without pulling any punches.

Losing Iraq?

Two concessions:
1) Every human life is sacred. We owe our fallen soldiers respect and gratitude, and we our their families our support.
2) I have no idea how reliable the Federation of American Scientists is as a source.

Nevertheless, the next time someone tells you that 3000 casualties means we are losing the war in Iraq, you might want to direct them to pages five and six of the following report on American casualties in all of its wars:
http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/RL32492.pdf

If the loss of 3000 valiant lives is a complete military failure, then there have been very few wars for which we could claim any sort of victory.

I Swear I'm not a Relativist Marxist

I feel rather bad for what I am about to do.

I’m going to seriously disagree with someone with whom I probably share many beliefs.

It rather reminds me of the time I stopped by a GAP demonstration, and then got attacked by one of the Pro-lifers.

Anyway, one Dr. Jeff Mirus recently published an article attacking English departments for their Marxism and relativism. The column was forwarded to me by one of the CSC’s FOCUS members and by my mom, independently.

Below contains excerpts from the column with my mostly nonsensical responses. I wrote it very late at night, so expect a revised version to appear shortly after Isabel and Therese have pointed out all the unintelligible nonsequiturs to me.

And so it begins...

Nonetheless, it is not without reason that English departments have been described as the last bastion of Marxism.

This I can attest to from personal experience. Marxism and its brood are, indeed, rampant in English Departments. I would also agree with Dr. Mirus if he were to argue that English professors abuse Marxism by indoctrinating it in their students. However, I personally do not think that Marxism is an entirely useless tool in literary studies. Far from being the One Ring that will plunge its wielder into ideological fires of Mount Doom, Marxism functions well as a literary mode of interpretation because the imaginary space of literature functions precisely like the kind of universe that Marxism describes. Consider Pope Benedict’s own concerns regarding Marxism. In his analysis of the Genesis story, In the Beginning, he warns that the primary flaw of Marxism is that its socialist ideology suggests that all intellectual phenomena are the products of man. Thus, Marxism dismantles belief in revelation and asserts that any religious system and any truths it preaches must be human invention. In other words, we live in a man-made world, and any attempt to say that God made the world is simply a story we tell ourselves to forget that reality. Pay no mind to the man behind the curtain.

That's what we're saying

Seen on the marquee in front of a church building, maybe one where they read James:

"Love in deed is love indeed."

Along similar lines, how about that 'faith inaction is no substitute for faith in action'?

Apropos of Nothing

On the subject of ending sentences with prepositions, people often recount a story involving Winston Churchill. When an editor dared to change a sentence of Churchill's that appeared to end inappropriately with a preposition, Churchill responded by writing to the editor, "This is the kind of impertinence up with which I shall not put."

http://www.getitwriteonline.com/archive/022703.htm

You knew it was coming...

Via Drudge...

Italian judge orders girl to abort baby.

An Italian judge ordered a 13 year old girl from Torino to abort her unborn child because her parents were opposed to the baby.

Italian legislation states that a minor is not allowed to decide whether to abort or not and the 'decision'  falls entirely on the guardians or parents.

The shocking story was brought into light by Italian newspaper La Stampa in which the paper reports that the girl didn't want to abort the baby but had to after the ruling. She then had to receive treatment after telling her parents she was going to attempt a suicide.

The girl got pregnant by her 15 year old boyfriend but despite this she still wanted to keep the baby.

However her parents were very angry and demanded an abortion. After the abortion the girl went into a frenzy and threatened she was going to kill herself.

"The unborn baby is still a life and I defend life whatever the situation." Severino Poletto, Archbishop of Torino told the paper.

"Society must take of this child. I certainly oppose abortions but this case allows us to reflect on the situation. We have to take a step back and ask ourselves how this could have happened to a 13 year old girl." he added.

So much for the rhetoric of choice, eh?

Left Afraid of Left

It's a bit old now (from September 2006), but you might find the following article by Sam Harris an interesting read: Head-in-the-Sand-Liberals.

Sam Harris doesn't like people like us. In fact, he wrote a book about how religion prevents progress towards a global civilization. Anyway, Mr. Harris's point is that he's about as liberal as they come, and even he thinks that liberals on a whole have absolutely no idea how large a number of Muslims hate the West or what the ideological underpinnings are behind terrorism. Or, as he puts it while discussing left-leaning September 11 conspiracy theorists:

Such an astonishing eruption of masochistic unreason could well mark the decline of liberalism, if not the decline of Western civilization. There are books, films and conferences organized around this phantasmagoria, and they offer an unusually clear view of the debilitating dogma that lurks at the heart of liberalism: Western power is utterly malevolent, while the powerless people of the Earth can be counted on to embrace reason and tolerance, if only given sufficient economic opportunities.

I stumbled upon this article through the comment boxes while reading Dinesh D'Souza's reiteration of his position that what is fueling radical Islam is a hatred for the exportation of secularism rather than a hatred for Judeo-Christianity as such.

Welcome back...

via Drudge:
Some Anglican Churches are at least flirting with the idea of realigning with Rome, given the schism over homosexuality and the predominance of active Catholics over Anglicans in England herself. I just hope Fr. Gareth can avoid telling them all, "I told you so."

via Townhall:
Chuck Colson talks about a Princeton Chastity group that (get this crazy idea) thinks sexual activity will be more rewarding, beautiful, and unitive if reserved only for marriage. Those nutty, liberal, ivy league students...

I memorized it so I wouldn't have to remember it...

The 10 AM here at the CSC has been singing the gloria in two parts for the last few months.
The women are supposed to sing the one part, and the men are supposed to sing the next.
Typically, however, this means virtually no one sings any of the parts other than the choir.
My theory on this is that we've all gotten so used to singing or saying the gloria as a whole, that we are pretty much incapable of being able to sing every other verse...simply because that would require being able to recall that verse completely on its own.
It's like whenever one of the department copiers asks me to enter the last five digits of my social security number as a keycode, and I have to stop and rattle off the whole number in my head and start typing when I hit the fifth number.

Guys everywhere wish they had thought of that

Hacker remote-controls his Roomba vacuum cleaner with his Wii remote; plans to be able to use his Nintendo DS to be able to control it via the internet from anywhere in the world where he can get wireless.