After an explosion of interest in the Catholic blogosphere surrounding the election controversy and subsequent protests in Iran, there has been no peep whatsoever regarding the obvious coup that has taken place in Honduras in which School of the Americas graduates removed president Manuel Zelaya from power.
This silence likely mirrors the relative silence in the u.s. corporate media in general. Latin America simply has not mattered very much to most North Americans, including North American Catholics.
What it certainly shows, though, is that the predominantly right wing Catholic blogosphere, ostensibly interested in independent reporting and commentary on matters from a faith perspective, is simply no different from the rest of america. Interest in “freedom” and “democracy” only goes so far. Cries for democracy are reported and affirmed only when the results would correspond to the Catholic right’s political positions. When the democratically elected leader is a somewhat left-leaning figure, democracy matters little.
For those who are interested in keeping up on the events in Honduras, I recommend the following sites:
“[T]he teaching of the Catholic Church on any number of so-called life issues — abortion, the death penalty, euthanasia, the waging of war — runs counter to the theory and practice that prevails in the political order we call ‘the United States of America,’ but Catholics have nevertheless managed to accomodate themselves all too well to this political order. This becomes disturbingly clear during wartime when the church ceases to be a body in and of itself and becomes, in keeping with [Randolph] Bourne’s description, just one more cell within the body politic of the state. This is why Catholics rarely if ever ask themselves a question that must be asked in the United States in this day and in wartime: Why should Catholics defend a political order that protects by law the so-called right of parents to destroy their unborn sons and daughters?”
(Michael J. Baxter, “Dispelling the ‘We’ Fallacy from the Body of Christ: The Task of Catholics in a Time of War,” Dissent from the Homeland: Essays After September 11, Ed. Stanley Hauerwas and Frank Lentricchia (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2003), 114)
Catholic Does Not Equal the Vatican:
A Vision for Progressive Catholicism
by Rosemary Radford Ruether
The New Press / $23.95 US (list)
[Amazon] [New Press]
As one of the pioneers of feminist theology, Rosemary Radford Ruether has had impressive, if controversial, career and if her new book is any indication, she is showing no sign of slowing or toning it down.
Her new book, part of the “Does Not Equal” series from The New Press, reads as a manifesto for “progressive Catholicism” against what Ruether, as others do, perceives as a wave of traditionalist back-pedaling. The series clearly intends to challenge and complexify religious traditions that appear from the outside to be monolithically “right-wing.” Such a series is indeed welcome and necessary at this historical moment when “religion is back” so to speak (although in most parts of the world, religion never went anywhere). Two other titles in the series are Evangelical Does Not Equal Republican… or Democrat and Judaism Does Not Equal Israel (I’m particularly interested to read the latter, written by Marc Ellis, a well-known Jewish liberation theologian).
Congratulations to Brett Salkeld — one of our newest contributors at Vox Nova — and his co-author (and friend to both of us) Leah Perrault on the publication of their new (and first!) book How Far Can We Go? A Catholic Guide to Sex and Dating. (Buy your copy direct from the publisher, Novalis, not from Amazon!)
Look for an interview with Brett here soon, where he will tell us more about the book.
“The prohibition against killing persons is the limit situation in ethics… If we violate this principle, we violate the moral order and the claims that personal reality make on us. This is not to say that torture, brainwashing, and slavery are less evil. It is to say that such cruelty partakes in the fundamental depersonalization of which intentional killing is the prime, irreversible example. An ethics of radical personalism yields to the exceptionless moral principle that personal life must not be negated — because in doing so, the foundation of moral experience itself is rejected.”
(John Kavanaugh, SJ, Who Count As Persons?: Human Identity and the Ethics of Killing, p. 120)
I’m not sure I like the use of the word “sectarian” to describe narrow republicatholic partisanship — their views and tactics certainly are “sectarian” but there are different types of Catholic “sectarianism”! — but the editorial in the last issue of America contains some wise words about the current climate of american Catholicism. Some excerpts:
For today’s sectarians, it is not adherence to the church’s doctrine on the evil of abortion that counts for orthodoxy, but adherence to a particular political program and fierce opposition to any proposal short of that program. [...] Their tactics, and their attitudes, threaten the unity of the Catholic Church in the United States, the effectiveness of its mission and the credibility of its pro-life activities.
Yesterday a u.s. air raid in Afghanistan killed as many as 150 people and in its wake, the “peace president” Obama is preparing to send 21,000 more reckless troops to Afghanistan to fill more tractor trailers with pieces of human bodies.
According the report cited above, the Pentagon is preparing to put its spin on the event by blaming the Taliban for “staging” the massacre. The Red Cross as well as the local population insist that u.s. air strikes were the cause. What is your gut reaction? Who are you immediately inclined to believe? Take this to prayer. Attention to your gut reaction might indicate what kind of preferential options lie at the heart of your spirituality.
We’re already hearing “apologies” from Obama and Clinton. We’ve heard them before. The u.s. never really means to kill anyone with the bombs that it drops. 150 people an accident? I’m with Yifat Susskind who writes:
Soon enough we’ll be hearing the official “regrets.” I don’t want to hear them. I’m sick of the twisted logic that allows the US military to drop bombs on people and then claim it was a mistake when the bombs land on people. You don’t deliberately do something with a known outcome and then get to call the result a mistake.
A massacre is a large-scale, indiscriminate killing; which is precisely the known outcome of the US air strikes in Afghanistan. So let’s call this a massacre. And let’s work to end the air strikes before another Afghan family has to hear how sorry the US military is. (Empahasis added)
It’s time pro-life Catholics in the united states made a consistent preferential option for all victimized human life and begin to unambiguously oppose the terrorism actively committed by their government. And it’s time for President Obama — who has made some significant moves against torture — to end the blatant and disgusting disregard for human life that is continually committed by “our boys,” now under his command.
Get u.s. soldiers out of (insert country here) now, before they kill again.
Let it be quite clear
that if we are being asked
to collaborate
with a pseudo peace,
a false order,
based on repression and fear,
we must recall that the only order
and the only peace
that God wants
is one based on truth and justice.
Before these alternatives,
our choice is clear:
We will follow God’s order,
not men’s.
Look, I’m a practicing Roman Catholic, but you don’t have to be Catholic, you don’t have to be a Christian to work for Blackwater.
- Erik Prince, founder of mercenary military organization Blackwater and convert to Roman Catholicism
An acquaintence of mine is a Pentecostal Christian studying historical theology at a Catholic theological school. He is — as the kids say — “way into” conspiracy theories. I had a conversation with him today about the “tensions” between the Jesuits and Opus Dei. I mentioned that a good resource on Opus Dei is John Allen’s deliberately balanced book, a balance which is helpful in that it lets the real (and very problematic) features of the Opus Dei spirituality shine through, as opposed to the sensationalized “Da Vinci Code” characteristics that we hear about in popular culture.
The problem with Opus Dei’s spirituality is that it is an extreme version of a dualism that has plagued the Church for some time. The Christian separation of politics and religion — the dualism that allowed German Christians to turn a blind eye when other German Christians were slaughtering Jews and that allowed Catholics to slaughter other Catholics in the Latin American civil wars — continues in our own time and in increasingly insidious ways. Sadly, the general assumption of many versions of the Catholic “spirituality of work” seems to be that Catholics should seek to “sanctify” the work that they do, no matter what that work might be. Read the rest of this entry »
I’m pleased to share that I’ve been invited to join in the conversation over at Tom Beaudoin and Brian Robinette’s Rock and Theology project, sponsored by Liturgical Press, as a co-blogger. My first post is here. Read more about the project here.
In response to Blackadder’s very fine post on torture today, a reader rightly responded that if torture is always immoral then we should not care whether it works or not. Debating the question opens us to the possibility that if torture did work, then we might have to accept the morality of torture. These are important questions, but I think these debates sidestep another important, but neglected, dimension to the issue of torture.
The fact is, torture both does and does not work. It seems increasingly evident that, despite the dishonest claims of torture apologists (such as the ones BA cited in his post), it simply does not work in terms of gaining information, “keeping us safe,” etc.
But there are deeper realities at work here, deeper justifications for torture that are often hidden and always insidious. As William Cavanaugh discusses in his book Torture and Eucharist: Theology, Politics and the Body of Christ, torture does in fact “work” as part of the technology of the authority of the state. Torture is a liturgy in which the power of the state to do whatever it wants to whomever it wants is sacramentalized. The fruits of this sacrament are fear and arrogance. The u.s. military government may not be extracting useful information from the victims that “keeps us safe,” but the claim that it is and the debates surrounding this claim only serve to distract attention from the real way torture works: exerting violent power over the bodies of human beings. Read the rest of this entry »
I’ve been dipping back into the riches of Karl Rahner’s writings recently as a result of some T.A. work I’ve been doing. I can’t help but be comforted by his reflections on how to bear with the reality of being a member of a flawed and sinful Church, particularly a Church whose flaws spring from national pathologies. A taste:
“We cannot have a fatherland unless we are prepared to live with its philistines and slackers. It is the same with the Church. We must not simply identify the ‘Catholicism’ of a particular country with the Church as a whole and blame the latter for the narrowness and hard-heartedness of a particular regional Catholicism. But, even in a local church where this narrow-minded Catholicism prevails, the word of God and his grace is proclaimed, his forgiveness granted and the death and resurrection of Jesus celebrated until he returns.”
[Karl Rahner, “Courage for an Ecclesial Christianity,” in Theological Investigations, Vol. XX: Concern for the Church, (New York: Crossroad, 1981), 11-12.]
Vox Nova welcomes another new contributor to the fold, Brett Salkeld. Brett hails from Saskatchewan and is currently a doctoral student in systematic theology at Regis College at the Toronto School of Theology. His interests include ecumenism, sacramental theology, and sexual ethics. And — get this — his master’s thesis (which is set to be published) was on purgatory and ecumenical dialogue. Brett’s a creative thinker in love with the Church and we’re lucky to have him with us.
Jesuit priest John Dear, for those who are not aware, has been at the forefront of the Catholic peace movement for years. He’s been arrested over 75 times for his nonviolent protest of war and nuclear weapons. He was harassed by the u.s. military who chanted “Kill, kill, kill” in the front yard of his rectory in New Mexico. His response was to go outside and to command, in the name of God, that they not go to Iraq and that they leave the military. His opposition to the Iraq War got him kicked out of a middle-upper class parish of military families in New Mexico. His latest book is his autobiography, A Persistent Peace. In today’s interview with Democracy Now!, Dear discusses President Obama’s recent statement that, as the only nation to use a nuclear bomb, the united states has a responsibility to lead the way toward a nuclear-free world, as well as key points in his life of following the nonviolent Jesus.
I’m currently devouring volume one of Derrick Jensen’s two volume Endgame. Jensen is an anarcho-primitivist writer whose basic premise is that civilization itself is not sustainable and is inherently death-dealing. I don’t agree with every position Jensen takes. He’s no pacifist, and often seems to overemphasize his justifications of “counterviolence.” But the book has me hooked. I’m convinced that reading Jensen (like reading Ward Churchill) will make me a more honest pacifist. I’m also convinced that, despite his shortcomings, Jensen will help me to expand my awareness of what a “culture of life” truly is through his scathing, radical (i.e. going to the roots) unveiling of our “culture of death”: “The culture is driven by a death urge, an urge to destroy life” (xi).
Another aspect of Jensen’s writing that I find particularly appealing is that it seems to be rooted in a radical, and perhaps paradoxical, materialist spirituality. Not animism or pantheism, mind you. In another of Jensen’s books, he interviews a range of ecological thinkers, including theologians Thomas Berry and Catherine Keller. Aside from his obvious spirituality, Jensen shows an ability to make insightful critiques of our civilization’s theological dimension, or anti-theology perhaps, and the gods that we worship today. I’ve hinted at such critiques myself here before. Here’s an excerpt on the jealousy of the gods of the culture of death: Read the rest of this entry »
“Jesus’ resurrection is hope, first of all, for those crucified in history. God raised a crucified man, and since then there is hope for the crucified.”
– Jon Sobrino, Christ the Liberator: A View from the Victims (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books), 43.
A beautiful hymn may fill us with religious reverence; this is appropriate if the beauty of the song is in the service of our worship of God and if our reverence is directed toward the creator and redeemer. But it may be the melodic experience that really moves us, the aesthetic perception of a necessity of form, something analogous to our intellectual understanding of a natural necessity. Sometimes, indeed, the aesthetic attraction may be so great that the inappropriateness of the music or of the words of the song is not noticed, and the incongruity of singing it in a Christian church may not be perceived. The Battle Hymn of the Republic, that song to a modern version of Ares, is a good example of this; its bloodthirsty wrath, sword, and trumpet in the service of a particular army are quite out of place in a Christian setting, but its melody is so stirring and its phonemic patterns so attractive that the people who sing it most probably do not appreciate the meaning of the words they pronounce.
Robert Sokolowski, The God of Faith and Reason: Foundations of Christian Theology (Washington, D.C.: CUA Press), 140.
They charge us [Christians] on two points: that we do not sacrifice and that we do not believe in the same gods as the State.
- Athenagoras, A Plea Regarding Christians 13, c. A.D. 177
It is because other so-called gods do not right the wrongs of this world that they expose themselves as not gods.
- George Pixley
I’m honestly growing weary of Blackadder’s constant capitalist faith statements here at Vox Nova which blatantly ignore the real lives of actual people. His latest involves astonishingly absurd statements about the costs of coal, given to us through his parroting of quotes from the apparently equally ignorant physicist Freeman Dyson. Having just returned from my second annual Appalachian Studies Association conference — a gathering of activists, academics, educators, musicians and artists — and having heard first hand the stories of real people involved in the issues Blackadder dares to pontificate about, I feel the need to comment.
The New York Times Magazine article BA quotes says of Dyson, “Dyson has great affection for coal and for one big reason: It is so inexpensive that most of the world can afford it.” No where, apparently, do Dyson or BA consider why coal is “inexpensive” or what the true, hidden costs of coal mining might be for human persons and the ecosystems in which it takes place.
As M.Z. noted, Archbishop Chaput visited Toronto this past Monday and offered some post-election reflections for a decent-sized turnout (certainly not an “overflow” crowd, as some reports stated) at St. Basil’s Church on the campus of the University of St. Michael’s College.
I don’t have time for a full critique of Chaput’s lecture but I will note a few points.
First, the things I appreciated. Chaput began by insisting on his “non-partisan” take on the election and on american politics in general. This is certainly easy to say, and I’m certainly glad he said it. In reality, though, the rest of his lecture speaks for itself (more on this in a sec). Indeed, he spent a few minutes challenging the tendency Catholics have toward unquestioning party loyalty, which was also appreciated. Another good point he made was that Catholics not only need to vote in keeping with their Catholic consciences, but that they need to own up to the consequences of how they vote (there is also more to be said on this point – more later). Lastly, he criticized the often-invoked argument that abortion should not be considered a “litmus test” for whether one is a good Catholic or not. He argued that it should be, as honoring the sacredness of life is a core mark of Christians. So far, so good.
Abuse of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay has worsened sharply since President Barack Obama took office as prison guards “get their kicks in” before the camp is closed, according to a lawyer who represents detainees.
Abuses began to pick up in December after Obama was elected, human rights lawyer Ahmed Ghappour told Reuters. He cited beatings, the dislocation of limbs, spraying of pepper spray into closed cells, applying pepper spray to toilet paper and over-forcefeeding detainees who are on hunger strike.
The Pentagon said on Monday that it had received renewed reports of prisoner abuse during a recent review of conditions at Guantanamo, but had concluded that all prisoners were being kept in accordance with the Geneva Conventions.
“According to my clients, there has been a ramping up in abuse since President Obama was inaugurated,” said Ghappour, a British-American lawyer with Reprieve, a legal charity that represents 31 detainees at Guantanamo.
“If one was to use one’s imagination, (one) could say that these traumatized, and for lack of a better word barbaric, guards were just basically trying to get their kicks in right now for fear that they won’t be able to later,” he said.
Nearly everyone felt, after September 11, 2001, along with grief and fear, a huge upwelling of idealism, of openness, of a readiness to question and to learn, a sense of being connected and a desire to live our lives for something more, even if it wasn’t familiar, safe, or easy. Nothing could have been more threatening to the current administration, and they have done everything they can to repress it.
But that desire is still out there. It’s the force behind a huge new movement we don’t even have a name for yet, a movement that’s not a left opposed to a right, but perhaps a below against above, little against big, local and decentralized against consolidated. If we could throw out the old definitions, we could recognize where the new alliances lie; and those alliances — of small farmers, of factory workers, of environmentalists, of the poor, of the indigenous, of the just, of the farseeing — could be extraordinarily powerful against the forces of corporate profit and institutional violence. Left and right are terms for where the radicals and conservatives sat in the French National Assembly after the French Revolution. We’re not in that world anymore, let alone that seating arrangement. We’re in one that for all its ruins and poisons and legacies is utterly new. Anti-globalization activists say, “Another world is possible.” It is not only possible, it is inevitable; and we need to participate in shaping it.
I refuse to link to this particular post, so as not to attract traffic to such filth, but a new america-centered Catholic group blog today unbelievably claimed that not only is Jeremiah Wright “racist,” Joseph Lowery, who gave a powerful, truthful and repentant benediction at Obama’s inauguration is also “racist” for his “general indictment…of the white man” when he encouraged us to pray for the day “when white will embrace what is right.”
A commenter on that blog said it better than I possibly could: Nothing like a bunch of bitter white men sitting around looking for a derogatory angle on the day…
Sadly, I’m afraid this incredibly low blow could be a sign of the kind of commentary we’ll be treated to for the next 4 years, courtesy of the Catholic Right.
At the risk of appearing to engage in self-promotion, I would like to draw Vox Nova readers’ attention to two acoustic Christmas recordings that I made over the past few years which I have made available for free download. The first is a full-length CD called happy xmas, x is here that I recorded as a sort of audio Christmas card for friends and family three years ago. It is made up of mostly traditional Christmas carols, plus some contemporary songs and an original tune called “The Prince of Peace.” It’s available here. The following year, during our first Advent in Toronto, I recorded a three song EP called The Rebel Jesus after the Jackson Browne song of the same name. In addition to the Browne song, it features my version of Rory Cooney’s “The Canticle of the Turning” and a Chicago-area Xmas favorite “Hardrock, Coco and Joe.” It’s available here.
Over the past year I have done a little writing and speaking on radical music making practices, drawn from my own experience in independent music communities, and why Christians and Christian communities should think of music and music making a little differently than they usually do. I hope to share some of these reflections here at Vox Nova in the new year.
Anyway, I can think of no better time to experiment with musical “gift economies” than Advent and Christmas. I offer the songs as a gift to the readers of Vox Nova and hope that in some small way they may contribute to your own reflection (and merry-making!) during this holy season as we continue to welcome the Rebel Jesus to our world and into our lives. If you feel so inclined, let me know what you think.
Pope Benedict wasted little time in sending a personal greeting to Barack Obama congratulating him on his election victory and offering prayers for his presidency. Traditionally, the pope sends his congratulations only after the new president has taken office.
I have actually never abstained in a presidential election. Four years ago was when I started thinking more seriously about not voting, both as a Christian and as an anarchist. But ultimately I decided to vote then, defensively, against Bush.
In the months leading up to this election, I’ve wrestled with the question of whether or not to vote quite publicly on this blog, and my personal blog. I’ve certainly come to believe that voting isn’t everything, especially when imagining the type of politics that Christianity calls us to. I also believe more and more that the electoral process as it exists in the united states reveals the divisions and conflict that exist in the church, and more importantly, that it seems to reveal where the true allegiance of most Christians lies.
Indeed, I continue to believe that not voting can be a powerful form of protest in many situations. But I have resisted the idea that Christians either must vote or may never vote, and likewise, the idea that anarchists should vote or should never vote. As I said a while back at here, “I am not, nor have I ever been, an absolutist when it comes to voting. I find both positions problematic: to insist one has a duty to vote or to insist that Christians may never vote is to elevate voting to a level of importance that it does not deserve.”
In that same post, I said, “Sometimes, though, in the immediate circumstances, a particular election can mean the difference between life and death, or at least tip the scales slightly in favor of life.” What I was getting at was the importance of context. As I have said repeatedly, had someone like Hilary Clinton won the democratic nomination, I probably would not have voted. But after a lot of reflection, I decided that there are plenty of sufficient reasons to vote in this presidential election, and to vote for Barack Obama. Some scattered thoughts and positions I have come to as a result of this reflection: Read the rest of this entry »
The U.S. military conducted a successful strike into Syria on Sunday to kill a suspected al Qaeda facilitator, a U.S. official said Monday.
The American official, who would not be identified but who has access to U.S. intelligence, identified the intended target of the attack as “Abu Ghadiya,” an Iraqi whose family the official said has been active in smuggling money, weapons and foreign fighters across the Syrian border into Iraq.
Syrian foreign minister Walid al-Muallem disputed the explanation.
“This is lies from the United States,” al-Muallem said.
Earlier, al-Muallem had said at a news conference in London, England, that the United States violated international law and Syrian sovereignty.
“Killing civilians in international law means terrorist aggression,” he said. “We consider this criminal and terrorist aggression.”
In this act of terrorism, the united states military targeted a farm, not a military target. The deliberate killing of civilians is just as morally grave as the act of abortion.
In a recent article Deal Hudson implies that 61 bishops have come forward to “clarify” what Faithful Citizenship means, implying or saying outright that a vote for Barack Obama is unacceptable. This statistic, and accompanying list of bishops, has been parroted around the Catholic barfosphere for days now. A simple click-though of Hudson’s list, though, shows that his numbers are simply, factually, wrong.
Hudson’s list is largely comprised of bishops who spoke out — rightly! — against the views expressed by Nanci Pelosi and Joe Biden in which they misrepresented Church teaching on abortion. If you actually click through to the statements cited by Hudson, it looks like less than 10 of them are statements which actually attempt to “clarify” or “interpret” Faithful Citizenship by binding Catholic consciences in favor of automatically disqualifying Obama as a potential choice.
Hudson’s list, and those who quote it, combines episcopal statements of various types, statements which serve different purposes and which have different messages. He, and his messengers, lump all of these statements together as if they are saying the same thing and to give the impression that a growing number of bishops are essentially forbidding a vote for Barack Obama when this could not be further from the truth. The number of bishops making this move remains, fortunately, very very low.
As a Catholic who definitely believes that, between the two of them, Barack Obama is the better choice, my pro-life commitments lead me to applaud the bishops on Hudson’s list who spoke out against the views of Pelosi and Biden which deliberately misrepresented the views of the Church. But I also applaud the fact that the number of bishops telling Catholics that they may not vote for Obama remains very small, contrary to Deal Hudson’s misleading presentation of the numbers. Indeed, I can count these bishops on one, maybe one and a half hands.
We Roman Catholics talk an awful lot about being in communion with one another. Whether we are describing the nature of the Church, as in “communion ecclesiology,” or describing what we are doing at eucharist, or describing the collegial relationship of the bishops throughout the world and in each local church, the image of “communion,” being of one mind and of one heart, is often central to these discussions.
We all know the damage political elections do to our communities and to our Church as a whole. Partisan allegiances not only blind us to the motivation behind approaches to politics that differ from our own, but also to the demands of the Gospel. Election-time ugliness — american style — colonizes every moment, every conversation. Take, for instance, the fact that an acquaintance of mine recently sent me a message on Facebook to congratulate my wife and I on the birth of our daughter on Friday, only to punctuate it with a jab about how Obama is intent on killing babies. Is this what we have come to?
Click here for a video interview with Noam Chomsky on the presidential election. While he has argued for years that the political system of the united states has one party — the Business Party — which has two factions, to hold the view that there are no differences at all between these two factions is to ignore the ways in which the the differing policies do in fact have an effect on people’s lives. Like his friend and fellow anarchist Howard Zinn, Chomsky suggests voting for Barack Obama, but without illusions, as he is clearly the lesser of two evils. Chomsky’s reflections on why universal health care has become “politically possible” are particularly insightful.
Three Putnam County voters say electronic voting machines changed their votes from Democrats to Republicans when they cast early ballots last week.
This is the second West Virginia county where voters have reported this problem. Last week, three voters in Jackson County told The Charleston Gazette their electronic vote for “Barack Obama” kept flipping to “John McCain”.
In both counties, Republicans are responsible for overseeing elections. Both county clerks said the problem is isolated.
They also blamed voters for not being more careful.
“People make mistakes more than machines,” said Jackson County Clerk Jeff Waybright.
[...]
Putnam County Clerk Brian Wood said on Saturday that he is upset there are “so many negative stories out there and not enough positive ones. We want people to vote. People need to know the facts.
The “positive stories” Wood must be referring to would be that the people who voted for Republicans didn’t have any problems with their votes.
A few years ago the u.s. army released a shoot-em-up video game as a recruiting tool. Things just went from bad to worse. Meet the “Virtual Army Experience,” coming to a state fair near you.
“The vacuity of our society is revealed by our inability to come up with a sufficient rationale for having children. About the best we can muster is: ‘Children help us to be less lonely.’ (Get a dog; children make parents more lonely, not less.) And, ‘Children help give meaning to life.’ (Such children are seen as another possession like a BMW.)
“Christians have children, in great part, in order to be able to tell our children the story. Fortunately for us, children love stories. It is our baptismal responsibility to tell this story to our young, to live it before them, to take time to be parents in a world that (although intent on blowing itself to bits) is God’s creation (a fact we could not know without this story). We have children as a witness that the future is not left up to us and that life, even in a threatening world, is worth living — and not because ‘Children are the hope of the future,” but because God is the hope of the future.
“If we lack good reasons for having children, we also lack good reasons for deciding not to have them. Christians are free not to have children not because of most contemporary rationales (’I don’t want to be tied down.’ ‘I would not bring children into this messed up world.’), but because we believe in the power of God to create a people through witness and conversion rather than through natural generation. The church must be created new, in each generation, not through procreation but through baptism.
“It is our privilege to invite our children, and other’s children, to be part of this great adventure called church. Christians ought to ponder what an amazing act of faith it was for Jews in the face of constant and death-dealing Christians and pagan persecution to go on having babies. People of God do not let the world determine how they respond to tomorrow.”
Stanley Hauerwas and William H. Willimon, Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony (Nashville: Abingdon, 1989), pp. 59-60.
According to the opening prayer evangelical preacher Arnold Conrad offered at a McCain rally on Oct. 11th, John McCain is God’s candidate, and God must “guard [God's] own reputation” against believers in “other” “gods, like Hindu (sic), Buddha (sic), and Allah” by allowing McCain to be elected president.
It does seem there is one relevant difference between ’08 and ’04 on this question. In ’04, the question seemed to be: What should the church do about a politician who doesn’t follow Catholic teaching? This time around, it seems the question is more: Does following Catholic teaching automatically mean overturning Roe v. Wade, or is there another way of trying to combat abortion? Will that be part of your discussion?
Someone told me once that they think the legislative question is lost, both in terms of same-sex marriage and in terms of abortion, and that what the church should be focusing its energies on is changing the thinking in order to lead people not to choose abortion. I certainly think there’s some importance to that. We may find ourselves hamstrung in terms of our capacity to change legislation, or the thinking of legislators. Yet we can still work to make our teaching more influential in changing people’s thinking, helping them to see that there are alternatives, there are opportunities to find support, whether it’s financial or whatever – whatever the pressing concern is that leads to a decision as a difficult as it is, to abort a child. I think we need to do both, in some ways. I don’t think we can give up on the legislative challenge, but I think we have to work more intensively to try to change the thinking of people, to help them understand why the church teaches what it does.
To build a grassroots culture of life?
Right.
Some argue that you can be genuinely opposed to abortion, yet as a matter of prudential judgment believe that it would be counter-productive to try to make abortion illegal. Do you think it’s possible to reconcile that with the teaching of the church?
It depends on how the person is thinking through that as a legislator. It’s complicated. I think that our encouragement to legislators who are Catholic, and who are voting for pro-choice legislation, is to emphasize the importance of the fact that the church sees these acts as intrinsically evil. It’s not something that we can wink at, or take lightly. I think it’s a both/and. We have to keep working at creating a society in which the law doesn’t support an act that is intrinsically evil, but even perhaps more important, and in the end, more effective, is changing the thinking of people in how they approach this terribly difficult decision.
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"In their patriotism and in their fidelity to their civic duties Catholics will feel themselves bound to promote the true common good; they will make the weight of their convictions so influential that as a result civil authority will be justly exercised and laws will accord with moral precepts and the common good."
Second Vatican Council, Apostolicam actuositatem 14
Posted by Michael J. Iafrate 
Posted by Michael J. Iafrate 
Posted by Michael J. Iafrate 
Catholic Does Not Equal the Vatican:
Congratulations to 
Jesuit priest John Dear, for those who are not aware, has been at the forefront of the Catholic peace movement for years. He’s been arrested over 75 times for his nonviolent protest of war and nuclear weapons. He was harassed by the u.s. military who chanted “Kill, kill, kill” in the front yard of his rectory in New Mexico. His response was to go outside and to command, in the name of God, that they not go to Iraq and that they leave the military. His opposition to the Iraq War got him kicked out of a middle-upper class parish of military families in New Mexico. His latest book is his autobiography, A Persistent Peace. In today’s 
