I always feel embarrassed and slightly disconcerted whenever I foolishly read Internet comments and see attacks on the Church based on our shadier historical moments.
Even though real historians are often able to make things like Crusades, missions gone wrong, and Inquisitions less horrifying to our modern sensibilities by putting them in their proper contexts, there are still those stinging thoughts: "Shouldn't God's Church have known better" or "If it did know better, shouldn't it have done more to stop it?"
If the fact that the Church has often wandered into sin could provide ammunition for people who want to argue the Church is a fraud, it seems to me that the fact that the Church always comes out of sin might be historical evidence in favor of its trueness. I'm not sure I want to say that the Church pulls itself out of sin though -- it seems to me that oftentimes God has to do the pulling.
God said that Hell wouldn't prevail against the Church, but I don't recall Him saying that the Church would be free of sin. Otherwise, why would Christ have instituted a sacrament of confession?
The Church might be free of doctrinal error, but that doesn't mean it is free of erroneous judgment in action. Even through the Church's own reforms, it always sticks to its
fundamental truths, and its fundamental truths always points towards
something beautiful in the end. Even when it has turned ugly, it's
managed to return to its former beauty. Indeed, the Church
paradoxically comes out of its dark times more perfected, galvanized in
the process of shedding its sins. While the Church should always have loved perfectly, it paradoxically loves more perfectly after it sees how it has loved imperfectly.
I wonder if this is universally true of all religions, because goodness knows that some religions seem to have taken irrevocable steps towards evil, hatred, and ugliness...
I just read about Wolfram Alpha, a Website running a computational program that is supposed to compute all the data on everything known in the world to produce answers to any kind of question on any kind of topic. So naturally, my first question was... I guess I'll have to try that one again in about ten million years...
Thinking again about the Obama/Notre Dame tryst, there is an uncanny parallel in it.
Fr. Jenkins was really just exploiting Obama, as most schools do with their speakers. Commencement speakers are, in the end, just photo-ops, so that the school can use the likeness of the commencement speaker for years to come in their admissions campaigns.
But that triggered the following analogy...
Obama at ND is to Jenkins what Air Force One over NY is to Obama.
Both presidents managed to scare the bejeebers out of their constituencies for a very expensive but ultimately unnecessary photoshoot. Neither president has adequately managed to address the scares, or take sufficient responsibility for the boneheadedness of their actions.
It seems to me that this is part of the result of what scholars are describing as the re-emergence of visual culture. It's the hip thing to study now, even for literary scholars who used to, you know, try to understand the meaning of text (although even printed text can be described as "visual culture" since reading typically involves eyes scanning a page). Anyway, in a society that conveys meaning more through visual images of things rather than the literary signification of things through words (pictures are no longer worth a thousand words, they are worth a million things...those things often being dollars), we shouldn't be surprised by people thinking less about what Obama's words mean than how great he will look in a ND hood on the cover of a ND brochure.
What Fr. Jenkins wanted was an image -- not meaningful words. For years to come, the inky or pixellated representations Fr. Jenkins and Obama will be frozen in gleeful but silent smiles on ND publications. Obama's words will soon be forgotten, if they were ever heard at all -- but his face is now locked in the public imagination as that of a proud Notre Dame graduate
FoxNews has reported that the columnist Maureen Dowd essentially cut and pasted text from an online source in one of her columns and presented them as her own words without attribution.
In my field, we call that plagiarism, and it results in a big fat F for the class.
To be fair, however, almost no one is ever kicked out of school for plagiarism anymore. In fact, plagiarism doesn't even go on anyone's permanent record. Students just retake the class and the dishonorable discharge disappears...that, or the matter is recorded in a super-secret file that no one but administrators see.
And, of course, I don't see how we can penalize plagiarists considering we have one as a Vice President.
My favorite part of Dowd's squirrelly excuse, however, is the following:
Dowd, who won a Pulitzer Prize
for commentary in 1990, told The Huffington Post that the mistake was
unintentional. She claims she never read Marshall's post last week and
had heard the line from a friend who did not mention reading it in
Marshall's blog.
In recent years, I've started telling my students even to cite conversations that they have with people if it influences their paper. I tell them that it's important because it might be that the person they are talking to is actually referencing a third person's ideas...so, while you might think you are just plopping in ideas from a conversation that I'll never find out about, the reader will nevertheless think you are plagiarizing your friend's original source. Now, I have an article to prove it happens!
I can't bear to bring myself to watch the video of Obama being interrupted during the Notre Dame speech (or should I say, "Notorious Dame speech")? I'm worried the hecklers are going to embarrass the rest of us pro-lifers.
Speaking of embarrassing, did anyone else see that totally weird interview of Roe on Fox&Friends, or whatever that strange morning show is?
I've never heard her speak before, but she seemed totally spaced out, distracted, and trippy...in a bad way. She almost seemed like she didn't know she was being broadcast on live television.
And speaking of embarrassing, I'm seeing conflicting reports of what Alan Keyes was pushing at the protest (before he was arrested). Was he pushing an empty stroller, or a stroller with a bloodied baby doll? It's hard to tell from the NYT photo. And who gave him the Spongebob stroller? What were they thinking? Couldn't the protesters get their hands on a more traditionally looking perambulator just for effect?
I realize I must sound like I am playing devil's advocate, here. For the record, I think ND should not have invited Obama given his stance on abortion. I also think it is inspiring to know that there were students and faculty who protested in reasonable and dignified ways.
Of course, I'm not quite sure why I should be embarrassed by fringe protesters. Our fringe still looks classier than most of the mainstream protesters on the other side...
Pope Benedict had just wanted to retire...but, no, God had to call him to be pope. He must have known being the shepherd of the world equated to one perpetual ulcer.
As I'm sure you know, he's in the middle of a Middle East tour. From the news, it doesn't seem to be going so well.
What is most curious about today's conflict, however, is that some Israelis are complaining because the pope failed to mention Nazis and Germans while condemning the Holocaust. To me, this sounds rather akin to the problem of Mel Gibson's Passion. Some Jewish groups were upset that the film laid the blame for Christ's persecution solely at the feet of the Jews, as if cruelty and barbarism were not a universal human problem. To lay the Holocaust at the feet of Nazi Germans, to demand that the Germans' responsibility for the Holocaust be rehearsed over and over, seems a bit dangerous -- as if there was something distinctly German about genocide rather it being something horrible that hides in the shadows of all human hearts.
Of course, there is more going on than just this...
"The pope spoke like a historian, as somebody observing from the
sidelines, about things that shouldn't happen. But what can you do? He
was part of them," said parliament speaker Reuven Rivlin. "With all due respect to the Holy See, we cannot ignore the baggage he carries with him."
Rivlin said that "with all due respect to the Holy See, we cannot
ignore the burden he bears, as a young German who joined the Hitler
Youth and as a person who joined Hitler's army, which was an instrument
in the extermination".
I came to the memorial not only to hear historical descriptions or about the established fact of the Holocaust.
I came as a Jew, hoping to hear an apology and a request for
forgiveness from those who caused our tragedy, and among them, the
Germans and the church. But to my sadness, I did not hear any such thing
These quotes, as presented, sounds suspiciously like old and disproved arguments that the pope was himself a Nazi. The third quote also brings up the questionable claims that Pius XII was complicit with Nazi anti-semitism. Rivlin comes off sounding like an anti-Catholic conspiracy theorist.
I think (hope, really) that Rivlin is overcompensating. The complaints are not that the pope didn't express remorse -- it's that he didn't express enough remorse or the right kind of remorse. It's not so much what he said as how he said it, for Rivlin.
What's at issue here isn't merely the Holocaust but the current very tenuous political situation in the Middle East, especially as radical fundamentalist Islam being spewed out of Iran continues to deny (while simultaneously and paradoxically approving) the Holocaust.
Read in this light, Rivlin sounds a bit like the child who is upset that daddy isn't clearly taking his side in the fight. I suspect Rivlin really wants the pope to express his unquestioning, wholesale support for Israel against Islamic states. Rivlin wants the pope to express anger and hatred towards groups that express hatred for Jews, and, essentially, he wants the pope to express embarrassment and regret that he belongs to groups that once persecuted Jews.
The pope, however, doesn't want to play group politics.
He wants to condemn evil and promote love.
To reduce evil to groups denies the individual responsibility in that evil, and, perhaps more devastatingly, hinders the ability to recognize that individuals who participate in evil can change -- seek forgiveness, and become friends.
But it's a bit hard to be friends with someone if, every time you stop by their house for dinner, they make you personally apologize for a crime that members of your family committed against members of their family.
I was just watching a snippet of some BBC documentary on whether or not the brain comes pre-programmed for religion. I didn't bother watching the whole thing, so this is a rather sloppy post.
My assumption is that the documentary was going to end without having any clear answers and that it would provide just enough scientific data to make one start to wonder whether religion wasn't all just a neurological disorder. At the very least, I had a premonition that it was going to suggest that the founders of major world religions were neurotics.
Or so I imagined from watching the start of the documentary, which featured two people suffering from temporal lobe epilepsy. Apparently, a fraction of those who suffer from this particular kind of epilepsy report distinctly religious hallucinations. One victim was an atheist, the other a Catholic. Both had seizures that led them to believe they were experiencing the supernatural. This was a starting point for the question of whether or not religion can be pinpointed to a region of the brain.
Should there be such a region, it seems to me we'd have some dangerous questions to deal with... Would a lack of faith or religious fervor be signs of a malfunctioning brain? Would such a region of the brain dissolve all spirituality into an unexpected byproduct of an evolutionarily beneficial neurosis? Or would such a region of the brain be precisely the kind of thumbprint of a creator god that Intelligent Design theorists rather desperately have sought out?
And this late-night rambling suddenly makes me have a strange thought...Is it possible to distinguish between thoughts that are pre-determined by brain activity and brain activity that is triggered by thought? (Maybe this is a non-question from a scientific, materialist point of view?) That is, in one case, perhaps I start thinking about pizza because something has triggered whatever in my brain stores the idea of pizza. Is there ever a case where I independently want to think about pizza, and then have to fire up those memory banks? Or is the very desire to think about pizza a result already dependent on a set of neurons that somehow went off and made me want to think about pizza?
If there was a difference between the two scenarios (my consciously willing myself to think about pizza vs. my brain subconsciously initiating pizza thoughts on its own), I don't know how we would tell the difference..
I was listening to an environmental initiatives leader describing a contest to encourage groups to recycle. A prize would be awarded to the group that recycled the most tonnage of waste. Everyone in the room seemed to think it was great to create a competition to recycle more than everyone else...Yay, recycling! What could be better for the environmental than to make recycling seem like fun? But it occurred to me that this prize could be something of an embarrassment. Just because we recycle more tonnage than other people doesn't necessarily mean we are greener...what if it just means that other people produce less waste overall, so they have less need to recycle it? A contest based on the tonnage of recycled waste could actual encourage people to produce waste for the sheer purpose of increasing one's overall tonnage of recycling. For example, if my apartment complex offered a prize for recycling, I might be encouraged to drink bottled water rather than put water from a spigot into a glass (recycling the glass in my dishwasher wouldn't count). Plus, when buying bottles of water, I would be encouraged to buy the thickest plastic, unless I could earn bonus credit for buying those flimsy new eco-bottles so many companies are pushing. Of course, the prize would have to be worth more to me than the cost of buying bottled water, but I think you can see the point.
An environmental prize for the group that recycles the most stuff is sort of like a prize for healthiness based on the number of times a person recovers from illness in a year rather than on the number of days a person remains free of illness (to say nothing of the degree of illness).
According to a headline on Drudge, Obama's expenses will be $11,300 per American.
Now, I realize some of that is probably in non-negotiables like social security and killer robots...but I suspect a large chunk of that money is new stimulus expenses. Let's just ignore the difference for a moment.
I want to know what would happen if you asked the average American: "Do you think you would be in a better situation financially if the government spent $11,300 on things it thinks you want, or do you think you would be better off financially if the government just gave that $11,300 right to you?"
Personally, I think I could do a much better job stimulating the economy with an $11,300 gift card to Best Buy or Toys 'R' Us for that matter than the government will ever do starting programs that I'll probably never use...but that's just me..
I just watched the "independent fan film" entitled The Hunt for Gollum. This may well be the world's single most aesthetically rendering act of LARPing that I've ever seen. (You might have to look up LARPing if you haven't been following the blog for years...)
Anyway, the fan film (which essentially is short hand for saying "Don't sue us even though we stole your copyrighted material") is a shockingly high quality mini-prequel to Peter Jackson's version of the Lord of the Rings telling the story of how Aragorn tracked down and captured Gollum.
It seems to me a particularly provocative choice of sequences to piece together given our current geo-political climate. Most fans were upset that Jackson skipped Tom Bombadil...I don't recall hearing many complaints that they didn't show the capture of Gollum (which, if I recall, is retold in book's dialogue rather than action anyway).
The conclusion of the fan film very abruptly shows a distressed Gandalf sitting in a chamber while Gollum wails and spills his beans.
Just how did Gandalf get Gollum to talk? Does Gandalf look distressed because of what he hears, or from how he heard it?
The very last scene has Aragorn asking Gandalf what they have learned, and Gandalf explains the long, torturous past of Gollum, how his mind has been twisted beyond human capacity to repair, and how it was all, in the end, worth it because they now know the enemy's next move. The determine they must use this new information to protect the shire from the Nine.
I have no idea what the director of this fan film hoped to accomplish, but the new historicist in me screams that The Hunt for Gollum lends itself very well to commentary on our capture, imprisonment, and interrogation of Islamic terrorists. It also shows the problem of releasing these terrorists after capture. Do you just let Gollum go, knowing that his mind is so warped that he is going to continue to seek the Ring of Power and destruction of the hobbits? (Keep in mind that in the original story, it's the somewhat naive elves that think Gollum's mind will benefit from some fresh air...which gives him the opportunity to escape...)
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