The Ark and The Dove

Newt Kid on the Block

The Hill.com is reporting that Newt Gringrich officially converted to Catholicism.

Is W next?

The Painter

Our Secretary of State recently visited the Basilia of Our Lady of Guadalupe.

Msgr. Monroy took Mrs. Clinton to the famous image of Our Lady of Guadalupe, which had been previously lowered from its usual altar for the occasion.

After observing it for a while, Mrs. Clinton asked “who painted it?” to which Msgr. Monroy responded “God!”

We should pray about this. Maybe it will sink in for her.

In the meantime, I recommend that she get some people to work for her who are a little better at informing her of where she is and what she is doing.

More on the Pope and the African AIDS Speech

Frank Pastore at Townhall.com extensively cites an article that NRO ran featuring comments from Edward C. Green from Harvard's AIDS Prevention Research Project. (Which makes this a reference to a reference to a reference, I think...)

The most useful paragraph for those who want to defend the pope:

The pope is correct, or put it a better way, the best evidence we have supports the pope’s comments. He stresses that condoms have been proven to not be effective at the level of population. There is a consistent association shown by our best studies, including the US-funded Demographic Health Surveys, between greater availability and use of condoms and higher (not lower) HIV-infection rates. This may be due in part to a phenomenon known as risk compensation, meaning that when one uses a risk-reduction technology such as condoms, one often loses the benefit (reduction in risk) by compensating or taking greater chances than one would take without the risk-reduction technology.

At Least a Little Justice for the Papists

NBC reported that a New York hotel manager was fired for cursing at his bell captain because he showed up with ashes on Ash Wednesday. According to the New York Daily news, the bell captain has decided not to sue.

        "My priest did a real number on me," he told The Daily News with a laugh.

It's good to see that religious toleration prevailed in the end...and in our favor for once.

More thoughts on Notre Dame and Obama

I really wish I had been more passionate about these kinds of issues when I was an undergrad.
But when I was an undergrad, I thought as an undergrad.
Which means I didn't really think much.
I mostly just tried to survive any given week's worth of work and extracurriculars.
Sure, I had opinions, but I didn't act on them as much as I should have.
By no means think that I'm projecting my lethargy on undergrads of today, or even my cohort.
My undergrad experience lulled me into a complacency of agency. Sure, I had opinions...but I never bothered to think hard enough about the next step and, say, do things about it.
For instance, in for years as an undergraduate, I don't think I ever attended a licit Mass. I didn't skip "Mass," but I don't think the ones on my campus were valid. Did it occur to me to hop on a bus and go to a real parish?
Nope.
And I think I greatly retarded my spiritual growth by not thinking that far ahead.
This is all mostly a set up to say that, if I were at Notre Dame graduating this year, I would like to imagine that I'd be outraged by the indecorous invitation of Obama...that I'd not attend my own graduation in protest...and a myriad of other politically active acts of cultural subversion.
In reality, though, I'd probably just have been another sheep in the herd.

So I don't really blame the average Notre Dame undergrad for not taking offense to Obama's presence.
Plus, it's hard to blame seniors who have just underwent four years of heretical indoctrination. At least, that's what Notre Dame now appears to be doing to its students due to the Catholic orthodoxy PR disaster that this has turned into.

Another point I'd like to make is about the absurdity of arguments on free speech in this instance. Defenders of Fr. Jenkins, and Fr. Jenkins himself, are arguing that this is an opportunity to have conversation and debate.
This is absurd because that's the actual opposite of the purpose of inviting a commencement speaker.
It is an honorary position, like getting an honorary degree.
You don't invite speakers to debate.
There will be no question and answer session after Obama's address (at least, I hope not...graduations run too long as it is).
There will be no counter-speaker to challenge Obama's views publicly.
You invite a commencement speaker as a bookend to a college career. Such an invitation suggests that this person is a wise role-model; someone whose words are not merely provocative, but ought to be cherished in a memory. They are allowed, one might say, the ultimate last word as far as college education goes.

This is why it is absurd for Obama -- whose policies are often radically antithetical to Catholicism, even if his heart is in the right place -- to be invited as the last word on college at any Catholic campus.

Notre Dame could have invited Obama to speak on a debate panel if it was interested to creating a discourse.

Maybe, and bear with me on this, schools like Notre Dame should establish annual Heretic Lectures. By officially declaring the lecturer heretical, there is certainly no chance of confusing alumni or students or society at large. It would make clear that the invitation is not intended to honor the speaker, other than to honor them as the smartest of people who are intrinsically wrong about truth. Such a lecture would then inspire an exchange of ideas, a challenge of ideas, and, hopefully, a clarification and correction of ideas.

Perhaps what Notre Dame ought to do is declare a Commencement Heretic, so that the students can observe precisely the kind of attractive but essentially wrong ideologies they will have to confront in the real world outside their virtual reality experiment called college life.

With an official Commencement Heretic, everyone will be happy. The college can invite whomever they want, and orthodox students won't have to feel uncomfortable, as if they are complicit in the honoring of evil ideologies by attending their own graduation. I'm not sure how the Commencement Heretic would feel about his title -- some might quite enjoy it -- and those that don't would probably still be willing to accept it so long as they get a speaker's honorarium. Incidentally, I understand that the speaker's honorarium is often given to charity.

...I wonder to what charity Obama would make Notre Dame give its money...he's already going to make us all donate money for the destruction of those greedy embryos, who, like microscopic misers, think they can keep their genetic material all to themselves when other people need it more. Hmmm...Obama as the redistributor of genetic wealth...I think I feel another blog post coming on.

Not Our Dame

Lots of blogosphere buzz is being generated by Obama's upcoming commencement speech at Notre Dame.

There's concern over one of the most pro-abortion presidents ever being invited to speak at a Catholic institution.

This is distressing, but hardly exciting for me to blog about. What I found far more provocative was this quote in an MSNBC article to which Drudge linked:

“Notre Dame students generally come from conservative backgrounds,” said Mike Laskey, a recent Notre Dame graduate who wrote on the subject of ideological shifts among the student body in his position as executive director of Scholastic, Notre Dame’s campus magazine. “A good college education anywhere introduces new ways of looking at the world and shakes up students' perspectives. Because students come in conservative but not strongly formed, it makes sense that many experience an ideological shift to the left.”

I don't know what Laskey's position is on the subject, but I find the quote as such to be a bit disturbing.

I agree that a "good college education anywhere introduces new ways of looking at the world," but does that really have to include a "shake up" of "students' perspectives?" Really, don't we all know from experience that what happens isn't actually a "shake up" but a "shake down?"

Shouldn't a Catholic education be able to introduce students to new ways of thinking without alienating them from the beliefs they started college with? Shouldn't a Catholic education strengthen the students' faith in the face of alternative worldviews and help them come to understand their faith despite contrary points of view?

If the only people who graduate Notre Dame believing in the Catholic faith are the ones who came into the college with a strong sense of belief, then what's the point of calling itself a Catholic institution? Does Catholic merely mean that it gives strong believers have a more likely chance of still believing by the time they graduate?

Rather than looking at "weak" believers as vulnerable sheep in danger of being lost, this alumnus seems to suggest that a good Catholic institution should be structured in such a way that they are driven from the fold.

Oh, but perhaps I mistake. The quote never mentions Catholic, faith, or belief. It only mentions ideology, liberal, and conservative.

The Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil

Isabel and I were having a little discussion about the Fall of Man the other day...

Never a good start to a blog post...

We independently came up with a pet theory regarding the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Bad. It's probably something Augustine or someone smarter than us came up with. Augustine, or maybe a heretic, in which case I readily denounce any claim to the following reading.

(If no one else has already, I should come up with a name for a proviso pre-emptively denouncing any innocently heretical conjectures posted on the blog.)

The thought that we both came up with was that the Tree of Knowledge might not have been some sort of magic tree at all.

continued below...

No "Synthetic" Blood for Me, Thanks

One wonders how to explain to a hospital that you don't want a blood transfusion from "synthetic" blood made from "spare" IVF embryos.

But developing blood made from the cells of spare IVF embryos will raise difficult ethical issues for people not happy with the idea of destroying embryos to create stem cells. It also raises the intriguing philosophical question of whether the synthetic blood will have come from someone who never existed. In theory, just one embryo could meet the nation's needs.

Britain seems to be at the forefront of the technology, but The Independent reassures us that America will be able to pick up the slack now that Obama has promised more government aid to embryonic stem cell research.

As if embryonic stem cell technologies didn't seem vampiric enough...

Jettison some Weight...

Shortly after Christmas, the doctor weighed me in at 202 pounds.
It was a bit of a shocker as I was weighing in at 175 lbs. the summer earlier.

Not only had I gained weight on the outside, I was, so to speak, getting fat on the inside, as well.

Apparently, I had high triglycerides...which, not to be confused with troglodytes, are fat molecules bubbling around in your blood, rather than ape-like lizard men with spears.

So this morning I weighed myself (because for some reason that defies my logic we are lighter in the morning than when we go to sleep) at 179.6 lbs. Yay, me!

It's still not where I'd like to be, but it was nice to see a seven up in the tens digit after all these months. And, of course, the real trick is keeping it off.

But I haven't even started exercising, yet! That's a drop of about 22 pounds by doing nothing more than reducing carbohydrate in-take -- and replacing most of my snacks with either carrots, pea pods, or mushrooms. I went from eating foot long Italian subs to six-inch turkey on wheat on the nights where I'm not eating one lean pocket and brussel sprouts. Brussel sprouts are pretty nasty. I'm not sure who figured out that you could actually eat them, but I'm assuming it must have been during a period of famine. I also started swapping out my morning fruit juice with diet or lite varieties. Fruit juice, it turns out, is one of the worst things for you if you have weight problems. It's like drinking a healthier candy bar. Who knew? Breakfast is still a killer though. I'm finding it pretty much impossible to find a low-carb cereal -- I guess cereal is, practically by definition, all-carb. And then when you see the amount of carbs you pour on top of that with milk, you're pretty much ready to put the toast and jam aside.

It's not that I'm on a no carb diet, just a low carb diet. At least, that's what my nutritionist said. (Yeah, I was actually sent to a nutritionist. That's how fat I got.) For my height and weight, I'm supposed to eat no more than 75 g of carbohydrates per meal...which I was apparently already starting to do before I talked to the nutritionist, since I had lost ten pounds before seeing her.

Well, I guess I'll go sit around the house a bit more...

On Condoms...

Benedict is pretty clever if you ask me.
It seems like he's doing a good job getting the media to forget about its past complaints by reasserting new old things for them to complain about.
For example, now the Internet is aflutter with condemnation (condomnation?) for the pope's recent statement concerning the use of barrier methods to prevent the spread of AIDS.
This is news?

Anyhow, I love this quote from the director of WHO's HIV/AID's department:

"The guidance we give is that condoms are highly (effective) to prevent the transmission of HIV if they are used correctly and consistently," he said in a telephone interview.

The quote doesn't say how effective. Worse yet, the director qualifies his statement by saying "if they are used correctly and consistently." What I want to know is how often are they used incorrectly and inconsistently -- because that seems to be precisely the concern that the pope has.