Vox Nova

H.W. Crocker III’s article is reprised at Inside Catholic.  It is one of the more humorous takes on NFP.

Read it here.

Hat tip: Kari Lundgren

Apparently Obama shows his unworthiness to be in the Pope’s presence before they even meet.  Expect wailing and gnashing of teeth before the day is done over there.  As for the actual meeting, it will likely be boring.

The cast of characters escapes me at the moment, but I’m sure the combox commentariat will fill in the details.  The ideas of a certain Jesuit were condemned by a Pope.  The Jesuits continued studying the book claiming that the ideas condemned by the Pontiff weren’t the ones in the book.  The Pontiff rejoinded by noting that he was able to read and not an idiot.  The story reminds me of much of the reaction to the latest encyclical. Read the rest of this entry »

Read it here.

Hat tip: JD Flynn

Writing on the engagement of online personalities Peter Suderman and Megan McArdle, the psuedonymous The Man From K Street writes:

How should they get married? This afternoon. At the Arlington County Courthouse.

No, I don’t really care if they do or not. But seriously–this is supposed to be a blog that gets all judgmental and stern about societal trends re: cohabitation and/or delayed marriage. Suddenly we can’t muster any criticism about two folks who have been shacked up for almost a year because, unlike blue-collar Wasilla types or drugged-out C-list celebrities, they are “our kind of people”?

Let’s not get hypocritical here, people.

The man has a point. As a side note, I know for sure Ms. McArdle doesn’t identify as a religious conservative. I’m not as familiar with Mr. Suderman, and therefore I won’t offer speculation. For that matter, I won’t make further mention of either of them. Over the past couple years I have been invited as a guest or to participate in two weddings where the couples had living together. In one case the couple had been living together almost as long as we had been married.

When I come across this, I’m more relieved than anything else. Marriage is a milestone. Much like a baptism, I don’t really care about your struggles getter there (obviously assuming an adult baptism): you become a Christian on that day, and that is what’s important. The only time I ever really object is if someone gets defensive and claims they’ve been married longer than my wife and me, if you include the years dating. (Since my wife and I have enjoyed 9 years of bliss now, I hear more the variation, it’s like we have been really married 3, 4, 5, or however many years.) My reply is always the same. No, you have been married x years. People who speak of their long discernments prior to marriage are often like 7-year bachelor degree candidates, they want credit for something they haven’t earned. And just like taking 7 years rather than 4 years to get your engineering degree isn’t a signal that you are more desirous to be an engineer, taking your time to get to an engagement isn’t a sign of maturity. Likewise, playing house during prior to your marriage isn’t a sign of maturity or signal for its likelihood of success. Well, actually it’s a counter signal.

In honor of Michael Novak’s demagoguery of the yet to be published encyclical of Pope Benedict XVI, I invite the readers to offer their own commentary on the yet to be published encyclical.  Feel free to include quotes from the encyclical, at least quotes you think should be there.

I had a dream the other evening.  We were still living in our home.  For some reason, it was just my youngest son and myself.  I would say he was about 5 years older than he is today.  My wife and older two children weren’t around.  Our house was almost like the description of a flat in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment.  My son and I had one room, and we had boarders in the other main level room and the three bedrooms upstairs.  Presently those rooms are the living room, play room, den, and bedrooms.  The kitchen, bathrooms, and dining room were common rooms.  As I contemplated this further, I recognized that this was the concept of space that most of the world had.  I further pondered that the city I occupy could be consolidated into about a 6×6 block area under such an arrangement.  The scale was a bit shocking but altogether human at the same time. Read the rest of this entry »

By way of introduction, my step-brother about a decade or so ago joined some friends at a small translation company.  Since that time, that company has internationalized web sites and documents for many companies worldwide, including a number of technology companies in northwest United States.  He has decided to start a newsletter on language and culture.  Since I know many of you have interests in foreign languages or the origins of words, I thought I would share it with you.  And besides, throwing a bone to family seems only proper for a person writing on a moderately successful web site.

I think he hits about 15 languages in his opening salvo.  A brief excerpt from his opening letter:

When we look at the Latin word for money, “pecunia”, which derives from “pecus” (”cattle”), an earlier value system comes into focus. The cow as a core unit of value is revealed in the English word “fee” (from the Old English “feoh” meaning “cattle, property, money”). Interestingly, the word “capital”, which appears in many European languages, and word “cattle” itself do not come to us from early words for the cow. Both are from the Latin “capitalis”, which means “principal”. Meanwhile, in Welsh the word “da”, which is generally used as an adjective meaning “good”, can be used as a noun to refer to “cattle” and “goods”.

The cow is not the only animal to find its way into our monetary lexicon. The root of the Russian word for money, “деньги” (”den’gi”), and the Turkmen equivalent of the penny, “tenge”, is the Turkic “tän’gä”, which literally meant “a squirrel’s fur”.

On a blog owned by the New York Times recently, they hosted a discussion about a woman contemplating an abortion.  Many have felt the need to offer advice to the woman.  Many have felt the need to comment upon it.  Rather than abortion being a regrettable expedient that is tolerated so we don’t as a community have to address the consequences of the sexual revolution, abortion is treated as if it were the evaluation of competing moral claims.  Once more we as a society have moved from tolerance to embracing. Read the rest of this entry »

There is  an old quote attributed to a worker under communism.  “They pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work.”  The quote comes to mind when reading the Vatican’s new policy and various reactions to it.  That policy is the banning of Facebook and MySpace from within the Vatican firewall.  The typical reaction from the Type A personality types is that it should be the person’s responsibility to manage their time, not the boss’s.    I regret to inform folks that workplaces generally aren’t filled with their types. Read the rest of this entry »

I have been meaning to write for some time on what has become a staple of pro-life discourse – the comparison of legalized abortion to both antebellum slavery in the Southern United States and the systematic extermination of six million Jews and millions of others deemed unworthy of life by the Nazis, the Holocaust.

I am conflicted about this comparison because on some levels it does make sense, it is accurate, and it can be used to great effect. On the most important level, however, the comparison to the Holocaust makes no sense at all, and so any comparison we make between these phenomena must not be done hastily or casually, as if it can simply be taken for granted. I myself have been guilty of this, but I have tried to correct course.

Read the rest of this entry »

Three times now, fellow contributor to Vox Nova Sam Rocha has posted on the language surrounding the abortion debate, following my post, ‘Words Do Matter’. To recap, that post was an attempt to respond to the polemical assaults on the pro-life movement from certain elements in the pro-choice movement. Briefly, they argued that the words of our movement were as responsible for the death of late-term abortionist George Tiller as the bullets that actually ended his life.

Read the rest of this entry »

I have had it with the debate over the language used to describe abortion.

The argument that the language of the pro-life movement is responsible for the death of George Tiller is preposterous nonsense. It reduces us to nothing but objects pushed about by the forces of propaganda.

The truth is that one does not need propaganda to become outraged to the point of homicide; one can simply look up the details of what the procedure of abortion involves, particularly the partial-birth abortions performed by Tiller. The cold hard facts, regardless of any political spin or the additional words of any commentator, is quite sufficient.

Read the rest of this entry »

It’s okay not to feel sad over the death of George Tiller.  I know a lot of you are being told you should feel some sort of sadness.  If you happen to be against abortion and find everything Tiller stood for to be repulsive, of course you are a Christianist that might as well have pulled the trigger yourself.  Well, this is what you will be told at least.  Or you might hear from fellow pro-lifers that we must express how terrible a thing has happened because not doing so will hurt “the cause.”  (The quotes are there because like so many causes, “the cause” has consumed its object a long time ago.)  Just because a rich, white guy is killed for the evil he has done doesn’t mean that we need to mourn the loss of society.  George Tiller’s flouting of justice was reason enough to mourn the loss of society.  I don’t speak merely of his performance of abortions.  I speak also of his flouting of Kansas law, only to find himself acquitted when the Kansas Democratic establishment and a Kansas jury turned away from enforcing the very laws they had created.  While one hates to speculate on the impetus that drove a man in Kansas to kill George Tiller, his acquittal on breaking Kansas’s abortion laws when his violations were so manifest should be given honest consideration by those not merely interested in polemics.

Does this mean I’m endorsing vigilantism?  Not really.  Like the socialists of old debating, I happen to find violent revolution to be a harmful means toward accomplishing the goal.  For those still unsure, I don’t think violence is prudent.  I’m a little distressed to see the argument that violence should be dismissed as a priori illegitimate except as exercised by the State.  Oddly enough the nation that was founded in opposition to totalitarianism seems to have instilled an ethos that is decidedly totalitarian.  That is probably a bit too esoteric for this post though.  We have to keep in mind that a rich, white guy was gunned down by a serf in an act of vigilante justice.  Lord knows if this would have been a gang banger in the inner city killed by another gang banger, we would be seeing all this wailing and gnashing of teeth.

Now, don’t get me wrong.  I’m not claiming one should rejoice.  I’m giving you permission not to feel bad though.  For those that aren’t rich and white, it isn’t a tragedy when a person that does wicked things is harmed from doing those wicked things.  When a drunk driver is found 50′ from his vehicle and his car wrapped around a telephone pole, we don’t all the sudden wonder what happened to civil society.  Yes, it would be better if he weren’t dead.  No one wishes death upon the drunk driver.  Depending on your sources, roughly 60 people are murdered every day in this country.  Many of these deaths will go unremarked upon, even in the very communities from where they occur.  Some will want to celebrate Tiller as a political martyr.  There is no reason the pro-life movement has to join that celebration.  Check the obituaries over the next couple days if you are feeling guilty.  There are plenty of men, including men that have done heinous things, that could use your prayers.

Am I the only person who is sick of the debate over the minimum wage? Both here and at Inside Catholic the debate has recently come up.

I must say that, in the first place, I find the various attempts to cite empirical evidence amusing at best. No matter what any one economist says, there is another waiting around the corner to contradict him. Just reading the Wikipedia article on the minimum wage shows that, once again, ‘conventional wisdom’ and academic consensus has been turned upside down by new studies and new data.

My belief is that we cannot organize an economy on the basis of quantitative analysis and empirical data alone. Economists will always disagree. A new study will always prove that the old wisdom is, if not worthless, suspect. Meanwhile people’s livelihoods are at stake. Economics can be informed by scientific analysis but it must be guided and ultimately determined by social and moral considerations.

Read the rest of this entry »

Should we get rid of annulments?

Annulments after all are an innovation.  The Orthodox, for example do not offer annulments.  Add to this the number of marriages declared invalid due to lack of form, a judicial requirement and not one essential to the Sacrament of Marriage.  It would seem more fundamentally honest to say the Church will look the other way as couples remarry rather than to claim that nearly every marriage that doesn’t work out wasn’t really a marriage, no matter how many children suffer because of it.

I had attempted to keep my disgust quiet, but I’ve really had it.  Our latest celebrity convert Newt Gingrich has a decorated history.  While his wife was being treated with cancer, he was having an affair with the woman who would become his second wife.  His current wife was the result of adultery with his 2nd wife.  Being the good Catholic girl she was though - excuse me, I forgot to insert a devout in there too – she couldn’t marry the guy with whom she was sleeping until Newt’s annulment was rubber stamped.  Being that Mrs. Gingrich II married Newt after having failed at marriage once, the annulment was a rubber stamp.  Having been so impressed by his current wife’s piety, he finally joined the Catholic Church and has appointed himself spokesman for all that is good and holy.  To this, the usually suspects give an amen and thank God for Newt’s libido finally finding a Catholic girl to satiate it and leading him to the Church.  Quite frankly the whole thing makes me sick and smacks of the Church making natural marriage a joke.

Lew Daly has a provocative essay titled, “Family Warfare“, over at Front Porch Republic.

As I’ve noted before, my prefered terms in the abortion debate are pro-abortion and anti-abortion.  Over the past generation, the two sides have adopted the terms pro-choice and pro-life.  More recently we have seen people attempt to distinguish between pro-abortion and pro-choice and likewise anti-abortion and pro-life.  I’ve generally tried to stay out of these debates, because I think they are unproductive. Read the rest of this entry »

I hadn’t planned to comment upon Obama’s speech at Notre Dame.  I had figured he wouldn’t touch abortion with a 10′ pole and was proved wrong, but other than that, there wasn’t a whole lot that was interesting.  For whatever reason people seem surprised that he didn’t say he was conforming his views on life to Evangelium Vitae and then managed to be outraged because he didn’t.  His concession that conscience rights of health care worker were important didn’t seem to make a difference and was deemed wholly insufficient by those that had no intention of being contented.

The more interesting thing is the scorn and derision that continues to be heaped upon the student body of Notre Dame.  There were a number of people that were convinced that Obama’s presence was an affront to pro-life principles.  A number of people including large swathes of the student body did not share this view.  For this, they were considered the enemy, even if they actually were pro-life.  After several weeks of protesters on campus seeking photo-ops for their fund raising efforts and claiming that allowing Obama speak was to support abortion, it is little wonder that the pro-life interrupter was greeted like the Code Pink protesters at the Republican convention.  A funny thing happens when people keep insisting that you are the enemy: before long you start to think that people think you are the enemy.

A discussion I have been having with my Catholic brothers and sisters about the causes of abortion helped to speed along an essay I had planned on writing as a follow-up to previous articles I have written about consumerism and the culture of death. Fully adequate treatment of this subject will require a book, and hopefully one day I will write it. For now, an essay, limited in scope, but hopefully not in substance is what I have to offer.

Read the rest of this entry »

Just to make the record clear, I think Speaker Pelosi’s complicity if not outright endorsement of the torture regime is a good argument for her removal from the Democratic leadership.  One can find information on Pelosi and torture from various places, but here is as decent a place to start as any.  To reiterate, I’m not supportive of charging those involved in implementing the torture regime.  There should however be political consequences, and they should be bold.  Removing Speaker Pelosi from the leadership would be a good start.

For those uninitiated, I am a former Republican.  This does not mean I am a conservative and not a Republican, in popular parlance.  I stopped calling myself a conservative a couple of years ago, because the word became mostly associated with beliefs I didn’t hold.  I stopped really considering myself a conservative about a year ago.  Whatever conservatism in America is today, I’m not it.  In this dichotomous world, people are prone to label me liberal.  I guess there is nothing wrong with being a liberal, but I don’t consider myself one.  I consider myself to have a rightward disposition.  Being one of the ones that left, I figured I might as well advise the GOP on how to get back into the game.  Take it for it’s worth. Read the rest of this entry »

Debate with a right-of-center Catholic long enough, and the word “subsidiarity” will eventually come up. Parties such as the Democratic Party, we are told, violate the principle of subsidiarity by wanting the federal government to take on more responsibilities instead of leaving to the states what is their proper domain. Subsidiarity is recast as a ’states rights’ ideology.

There are a number of things wrong with the general idea. The first is that the GOP has presided over the expansion of government as well, and the GOP has admitted it, time and again – lamenting electoral losses with frank admissions of having done the exact opposite of what they were sent to Washington to do. The second is that “subsidiarity” is not a synonym for anarchism, privatization, or ’states rights’, nor does it justify any of these things.

Read the rest of this entry »

I’m not sure I can officially say we didn’t celebrate Mother’s Day this year, but we didn’t do anything for it either.  This is getting to be a more common occurrence at our household.  This past Christmas was the least enjoyable for me, at least since childhood.  I’m to the point where I would like to stay home (rather than travel) and go to mass on Christmas Day at my parish.  If any family are in town, we can celebrate together, but otherwise we’ll celebrate as a family and possibly with some friends whose extended families are also far away. Read the rest of this entry »

I had a second introduction of sorts to the idea of free range kids over the weekend.  Writing in Salon, Lenore Skenazy discusses how we as a society are overly protective of our children.  My first introduction was via a link a commenter at Front Porch Republic gave to her blog, suggesting the two blogs get together for a play date.  Lenore Skenazy’s claim to fame is a column she wrote a couple years ago about allowing her 9-year-old son to ride the subway home by himself.  For allowing this, she was deemed by many to be a grossly irresponsible mother. Read the rest of this entry »

There has been an interesting back and forth between The American Scene and The League of Ordinary Gentleman on the topic of education.  I have some loosely held, strong opinions on the topic of education.  What this means is that my mind is amenable to being changed on the topic.  So far the primary things discussed have been marginal pay, unions, autonomy, and school choice. Read the rest of this entry »

My sincere apologies for double-posting like this, but I’ve been up all night trying to get close to the bottom of this torture debate, especially in light of my previous post that details some of the less talked about horrors of Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib.

It is almost impossible for me to accept that on so important an issue there could be such ambiguity, confusion and uncertainty as to what the Church really teaches. I hope this brings us one step closer. Read the rest of this entry »

A terrorist has planted a nuclear bomb in New York City. The bomb will go off on the 2000th beat of the heart of terrorist’s unborn child. Do you order the abortion and save 1,000,000 people?

(This is a paper I wrote for my Faith and Dominant American Culture class)

Introduction

The current state of our American society with its contradictions and pluralism can be a tremendous source of anxiety and apprehension for Christians. We see some patterns of behavior that run almost diametrically opposed to the dignity of human person have become widely accepted such as abortion, assisted suicide, torture, same-sex marriages, premarital sexual relations, just to name a few. That same society in which Christians are supposed to bring the good news of the Gospel often seems to be ambivalent to Christianity and religion altogether. Thus, in the midst of such conditions, we ask ourselves many questions: How do we engage the world as Catholics? How can we confidently enter the public square? How do we make Christianity relevant to society and to its problems and concerns? Read the rest of this entry »