The Ark and The Dove

Who'da Thunk I'd Link to the National Enquirer

According to an article by the National Enquirer, some of the art in CD booklet for Britney Spear's latest album is anti-Catholic. Britney Spears is shown sitting on a priest's lap in a confessional. I guess she doesn't understand how to use a kneeler...on second thought, that posture might have been even more offensive.

Civic Engagement or Civic Enslavement?

Beware of Delaware!

Mike S. Adams over at Townhall.com has a spine-tingling tale of terror for this Halloween. Apparently, the University of Delaware has been requiring resident students to undergo certain diversity training.
According to Adams, this includes defining all white people as racist by virtue of being part of a privileged racial class, teaching students that reverse discrimination does not really exist and is merely part of a white racist ideology, and having students make documented statements concerning when they discovered their sexual orientation.

Quick Reactions to D vs. H Debate

My initial reaction to the debate is that I wish it could have stayed a little more focused on a particular religion rather than swinging wildly out of control. It's not really fair to lump all religions together, or even all strains of the same religion together...but that's often the course that Hitchens down which Hitchens seemed to push things.

By far, I think Hitchens' most compelling argument was the question of what was God doing for the thousands upon thousands of years of man's prehistory. It's a variant on the "problem of evil" question that atheists often seem to dwell on, only slightly more complicated. In the age of Christ, we can excuse God's inaction because we understand the concept of free will...and we can take consolation in the revelation of salvation. Our cave-dwelling, prehistoric ancestors may not have had such consolation.
It then occurred to me that the Bible directly addresses this issue. Even if you don't take all of Genesis as literal history, the Bible acknowledges that God only rarely reveals himself from the time of Cain until the time of Abraham. This makes sense from a biblical stand point because it is like God saying: "Okay, so you think you don't need my help? Let's see how you fair without me for a few generations...not so well, huh?" It seems like a reasonable pedagogical device to me.
But, of course, the fact of the matter is that God never completely abandons His creation. Think about all the minor examples of providence that happens in your daily life without God explicitly and directly revealing himself. God's hand was probably no less in the daily lives of our prehistoric ancestors than it is today. Of course, an atheist sees providence as coincidence, so I don't know that you can necessarily win an argument with this kind of retort...but I'm more interested in reaffirming faith than persuading a hostile audience at the moment.

I'll rattle some more reactions in the continued post...click through...

Hitchens....D'Souza....FIGHT!

Here are the YouTube debate videos  between D'Souza and Hitchens over "Is Christianity the Problem?"

Round 1, Round 2, Round 3, Round 4, Round 5, Round 6, Round 7, Round 8, Round 9, Round 10

I'm a wee bit too tired to respond at the moment...

Outting Dumbledore

I can't decide if this is a brilliant marketing strategy or a lack of artistic discipline. It kind of reminds me of George Lucas' special editions where, instead of screwing up everything with sequels, he just goes back and essentially rewrites (mutilates) the story that everyone already loved. I can only imagine the fun people on Youtube are going to have resplicing scenes from the Harry Potter movies to make Dumbledore's homosexuality even more apparent.
I also can't help but wonder what's next. Is Rowling going to admit that Hermione is really a Shakespearean-encoded reference for Hermaphrodite? Could she be trans-sexual?
And does it make anyone else think of The Family Guy's recent rewriting of Star Wars?

I Guess We'll Have to Get Rid of Schools, Next

While the way many of our bishops, pastors, and priests handled the sexual abuse scandals was in no way excusable...at least we can say that the problems were not merely endemic to a particularly religious institution, and certainly not related to issues of celibacy. A Fox news piece covers the "plague" of sexual misconduct among school teachers.

The passages that I found the most horrifying, but also the most resonant with the problems the Church has faced was the following:

Most of the abuse never gets reported. Those cases reported often end with no action. Cases investigated sometimes can't be proven, and many abusers have several victims.

 

And no one — not the schools, not the courts, not the state or federal governments — has found a surefire way to keep molesting teachers out of classrooms...

Too often, problem teachers are allowed to leave quietly. That can mean future abuse for another student and another school district.

 

"They might deal with it internally, suspending the person or having the person move on. So their license is never investigated," says Charol Shakeshaft, a leading expert in teacher sex abuse who heads the educational leadership department at Virginia Commonwealth University.

 

It's a dynamic so common it has its own nicknames — "passing the trash" or the "mobile molester."

Also unnerving was the following statistic: "One report mandated by Congress estimated that as many as 4.5 million students, out of roughly 50 million in American schools, are subject to sexual misconduct by an employee of a school sometime between kindergarten and 12th grade."

Makes home-schooling seem all that more attractive, no?

Objectivity

I have been perceiving an inordinately high number of not only anti-religious sentiment among my student papers, but specifically anti-Catholic arguments.
What's particularly alarming is that the students are making the arguments without clear evidence from the text. I'm certainly open to the possibility that the texts themselves could be anti-Catholic, but not for the reasons that the students are advancing.
Not that I feel at liberty to relate any of the gory details to you, gentle readers (mostly because I'd rather not type anything self-incriminating). Nevertheless, the students bringing anti-religious baggage with them seems remarkably higher than in previous years.

I'm Getting Better...

On the metro the other day, Isabel pointed out a sign for some health insurance lobbyist group.
It said something like "One out of seven Americans has no health insurance. That's not just a statistic, it's a tragedy."
The first thing Isabel noted was that it contained a comma splice.
The next thing I wanted to know was what has the rate of insurance traditionally been in this country.
It seems to me that if you were wandering around colonial America with a big sign that said "One
out of seven Americans in 2007 will have no health insurance," the colonists would first ask you what the heck health insurance was. Next, they'd say that was a pretty impressive thing, considering that we went from no one having health insurance to 6 out of 7 people having insurance in just two hundred years.
I'm not trying to romanticize the colonial health care system, nor am I saying that we shouldn't be concerned about the uninsured. I do think, however, that people have very short attention spans. Because the overwhelming majority of Americans have health insurance (if six out of seven people voted in this country, I doubt the polls could handle it), it's hard for them to imagine that throughout most of human history, health insurance didn't exist.

Almost as Big as a Sunday Mass Crowd!

The previously advertised LGBT Coming Out Day rally for domestic partnership benefits took place.
They had a whopping 250+ people in attendance...out of the 33,000+ people on campus.

UMD: Not Hate-free

I don't hear much about what's happened in the world after 1700, which explains why I only learned about the noose that was hung outside the Nyumburu Cultural Center.