Vox Nova

I’ll start with politics this morning.  There are three races I’m watching: California, Kentucky, and Nevada.  Presently, Boxer is leading in polling in CA, Paul is leading in KY, and Reid is even with Angle in NV.  The GOP needs to pull 2 of 3 to have a chance at retaking the Senate.  If they pull 3 of 3, the GOP will most definitely retake the Senate.  My intuition is the GOP wins 1 of 3.  The House will follow a similar dynamic, but be easier for the GOP to reclaim.  I don’t believe it is a given that the GOP will reclaim the House, but I’m not surprised that people are pushing for that expectation.  I think the generic ballot is deceiving a lot of people due to the GOP’s enormous edge in the South that is bringing up the national numbers.

Since I’m bored at the moment, I’ll go ahead and analyze all the Senate contested races. Read the rest of this entry »

“Christian faith occurs precisely where our own speaking and relating is overtaken by the divine dynamic of triadic speech. It thus entails two kinds of affirmation. The first is that we truly encounter God in Christ and–through the Spirit–hear in the Son the voice of the Father. The second affirmation is that this new kind of speech- relation can never become our own property but always remains gifted by divine disclosure. Our own new speaking, as an attitude of faith, is grounded in the relation into which we enter through listening to the voice of Christ, in scripture, liturgy and the body of those who celebrate his name. The speaking of the Petrine church as teaching and of the Marian church as intercession is neither ordinary speaking nor is it divine seeking but rather is a human speaking that has been overtaken by the trinitarian self-disclosure and has been conceived in the domain between the two which is marked by excess, risk and penitence. Christian truth too is of this kind, and is affirmed between a human reality and a disclosure of a divine reality which transcends any capacity we have to render an adequate account of it. Christian truth is therefore both a coming into possession and a form of dispossession. It fills us with a pervasive trust and knowing even as it robs us of the security of stable self-knowledge which dissolves into the dynamic of our own deepening relation with the divine being-in-relation, who is the trinitarian Word. The witness of Christian truth before the world is thus simultaneously the confession of our own individual and corporate inadequacy before the transcendent reality of the divine speaking that has come upon us. The affirmation of that truth and the penitence that we discover at the heart of our embrace of it necessarily belong to each other, and they find existential expression in the life of self-emptying risk for the sake of the other which is discipleship. It is the Christian form of life as compassionate self-exceeding before the other which is the true communication of Christian truth as the dispossessive, overflowing eruption of being and love from within the Godhead.”

A Theology of Compassion. Grand Rapids, Eerdmans, 2003. p. 284

In the light of the recent efforts to exploit fear and prejudice with respect to both birth-right citizenship and the New York mosque project, the question is: will demagoguery be the main tool that the Republicans utilize in the 2010 U.S. national elections? And, if so, will they ‘win’?

No argument will prevail against a person who believes good is subjective.

While driving home after a tiresome day at work yesterday, I was treated to a radio broadcast of a complete performance of Vaughan Williams Symphony #5–in this case, the near legendary RCA recording by Andre Previn.

Here is a small clip of Previn’s conducting the opening movement of the symphony, but on another occasion, with an entirely different orchestra. Youtube provides the rest of Previn’s reading, in the form of a series of clips , and I welcome any of those moved by the opening to click onto them.

If there are any twentieth century musical works in which artistic beauty convincingly intimates something of divine glory, I believe that this symphony is among them.

A question I grapple with over and over again is the relation of musical beauty to divine glory.  Involved here are a myriad of issues: among them,  how much musical beauty can reflect/communicate divine glory; how explicitly Christian a musical composition must be in order to do so; which  genres are more apt  to succeed in echoing divine glory; and which received compositions are indeed such echo-ers? 

I am interested in others’ reactions to the Vaughan Williams piece and, more importantly, their musings on the aforementioned aesthetic matters.

“The liberal case against gay marriage” is an article in the Summer 2004 issue of The Public Interest by Susan M. Shell.  While I don’t expect universal agreement with it, I’m curious what our readers think of the article.

For those wishing to comment, I’m not interested in what you think about Same Sex Marriage.  I’m interested in what you think of Shell’s arguments.

Often those of us who make mistakes are reticent to admit them publicly.  Unfortunately what results is that people are misled.  Today, I wish to confess that I went to a for-profit diploma mill.  I graduated from there in 2001 with an Associate’s Degree in Information Technology.  There were red flags from the beginning.  I had the option of continuing my investment for another year and earning a bachelor’s degree.  I declined to do so for a number of reasons, some personal.  One of the reasons I declined to do so was that it was apparent at that point that the degree was not going to offer any more street cred.

People shouldn’t get too wrapped up in education getting you a job.  At its minimum, it is a ticket in the door, although the value of that ticket shouldn’t be underestimated.  At its best, it, particularly vocation education, provides a path to understanding present and future technologies.  Having said that, education does have value for its own sake.  That is true in direct and indirect ways in regards to potential careers.  Nothing can replace the value of a good theoretical education.  While it is of course possible to get a good education outside of a traditional university, it takes significantly longer, takes more effort, and requires significant discipline in order to do so.  There are no shortcuts in life.  As one of the many IT professionals flooded into the market, I found myself in a professional dead end.  I will hopefully have my bachelor’s degree in two years from a real university in a more traditional educational area offering real potential career avenues.  Your time is valuable.  Don’t waste it in a for profit diploma mill.

Yesterday was the feast of St. Ignatius of Loyola, but due to the exuberant celebrations that tend to mark the day, we were unable to post anything.  I would like to offer some reflections on what is something of a trademark of Ignatian spirituality, and that is devotion to the Trinity.

For starters, in his autobiography, paragraph 28, Ignatius recounts:

One day while he was reciting the Hours of our Lady on the steps of the same monastery, his understanding began to be elevated as though he saw the Holy Trinity under the figure of three keys.  This was accompanied with so many tears and so much sobbing that he could not control himself.  That morning he accompanied a procession which left the monastery and was not able to restrain his tears until dinner time.  Nor afterwards could he stop talking about the Most Holy Trinity.  He made use of many different comparisons and experienced great joy and consolation.  The result was that all through his life this great impression has remained with him, to feel great devotion when he prays to the Most Holy Trinity.

Nor was this devotion a purely abstract reality. Each of the persons of the Trinity played a decisive role in the development of the Order and of Ignatius’ own spiritual journey. Read the rest of this entry »

The silent majority is a fairly ubiquitous rhetorical device.  Often enough, we like to imagine ourselves a part of it.  Even if the silent majority isn’t being falsely invoked in some cause – it prefers to be left alone – it certainly is real.  At some point you realize in life that people are more likely to tell you what you want to hear than to tell you what they really think.  Anonymous surveying has cleared up some of this, but even that isn’t always reliable.  For example, a survey is taken every Thanksgiving asking people how much they plan to spend on Christmas gifts over the Thanksgiving Day weekend.  When the results are compared to retail receipts, we find the data is near worthless.  Compounding this issue is that people have a terrible tendency to change their minds and don’t really plan near as much as they think they do.  Think of the story of the college aged boy who tells his roommates that he has had it and is finally going to break up with his girlfriend.  Later we find out that instead he bought her dinner and a movie.  The relevant information often isn’t before us. Read the rest of this entry »

Just a brief note on the immigration news from today:

C.S. Lewis once wrote about patriotism in The Four Loves:

Of course patriotism of this kind (love of home) is not in the least aggressive.  It asks only to be let alone.  It becomes militant only to protect what it loves.  In any mind with a pennyworth of imagination it produces a good attitude towards foreigners.  How can I love my home without coming to realize that other men, no less rightly, love theirs?… The last thing we want is to make everywhere else just like our own home.  It would not be home unless it were different.

The above comment prompted me to write in the margins of my book, “Then America has little imagination.”  My perception of the growing hostility towards illegal immigration (and immigrants in general, even if legal) is that many Americans cannot imagine that they have their own homes too and are people like us.  At the same time, if we can imagine those homes, we want these people to stay in them.  Often the impression I have had in the South at least is the idea that people from other countries should become like Americans, but they should do so outside of America.  They should make their homes like ours, but not come here and make themselves at home. Read the rest of this entry »

Property is one of those things that should be simple enough to discuss.  The tendency though is to define it.  And once it is defined, the tendency is to treat the definition as immutable.  Property however isn’t a simple thing.  It is a social construct.

To start, let’s take a simple example.  George has been working at a factory for 15 years.  XYZ corporation decides that George is too old.  They take George’s job and give it to Larry.  Other than age, there is no change in compensation scheme or ability.  Was George the victim of an unjust taking?  In the present generation, most would say no.  An older generation may have argued that XYZ corporation has a duty not to arbitrarily and capriciously remove George from his position.  They would have argued that perhaps giving George’s job to Larry could have been justified were Larry significantly more skilled or seeking significantly less compensation.  On what basis would they argued that George was mistreated?  They would have argued that taking away George’s livelihood presents a significant cost to George and his family.  They would have argued that those costs could reverberate to the whole community.  While some will surely doubt me here, we have already legally proscribed many similar things.  For example, it is illegal to fire a woman for getting pregnant.  We have banned age discrimination.  In many ways a man’s work is his property. Read the rest of this entry »

As my children age, I’m giving more thought to how I want to advise them on the next stages of their lives.  (My oldest children are in elementary school.)  My conflict is quite simple really.  On the one hand, I want them to be open to love and family formation well before thirty.  On the other hand, I want them to have graduate degrees and be secure in their ability to provide for their families.  All I need is a third option here, and I could say pick any two of three, as goes any number of things in life.  Like any good father, I don’t want my children to needlessly suffer, but the nature of life is that of suffering. Read the rest of this entry »

There seem to be few days that go by where someone doesn’t say, “Do what you love, and you won’t ever have to work a day in your life,” or some variation of this cliche.  Sometimes it is a person in a highly compensated field making that claim.  More often it is a person that has settled and feels some obligation not to make a young man cynical.  About the only cliche that is worse is the one about about hanging out a shingle and making your own job. Read the rest of this entry »

Here is something for the weekend. Bruce Nolan and the Sierra Quartet perform the first movement of Mozart’s heavenly Clarinet Quintet.

As is the case with FEHB plans currently, and with the Affordable Care Act and the President’s related Executive Order more generally, in Pennsylvania and in all other states abortions will not be covered in the Pre-existing Condition Insurance Plan (PCIP) except in the cases of rape or incest, or where the life of the woman would be endangered. – Department of Health and Human Services (emphasis added for those with difficulty reading a full sentence.)

This statement has been released for over 12 hours now.  It has been linked from this site for that length of time.  Yet if you go around the Catholic blogosphere, you still have people repeating NRLC’s speculative and now proven erroneous analysis.  While it is understandable that many of these places ran with this speculation, there is no good excuse for them not to have informed their readers of the truth.

Lifesite of course has not corrected their initial story, nor have they found HHS’s statement newsworthy.

CNA ran with the story, but at least noted that it was critics making the claim.   (This is not the USCCB’s media arm.)  They have not found HHS’s statement newsworthy.

Father Zuhlsdorf has run with the story and found his readers aren’t worthy of knowing the truth.

Jimmy Akin of the National Catholic Register doesn’t believe his readers are worthy of knowing the truth.

The American Catholic doesn’t fail to keep its readers ignorant.  (Update 9:46:  Blackadder of The American Catholic notes HHS release and responds.)

There are a myriad of other sites that don’t respect their readers.  (All claims are accurate as of this writing.  It is my hope that places actually do correct their misinformation.)

Minor Update:  A lot of sites have reported that the Obama administration is “officially” supporting abortion now when they made their accusations.  Obama does “officially” support abortion rights.  His campaign website noted this.  However, when the controlling agencies, in this case HHS and PA, specifically deny a proffered interpretation (and they have done so from the start), it is intellectually dishonest to claim the agencies are officially supporting a policy.  Official is a first party determination, not a third party one.

How one defines this will help to shape one’s ideology.  Her in the States, we primarily define freedom as lacking impedance from the law.  When we think of people who aren’t free, our minds go immediately to prisoners.  It is most often the metaphor we seek when describing other things.  For example, one might say that he is a prisoner to the sexual norms of a society.  Needless to say our country has a very liberal view of freedom, something that isn’t entirely shocking given our founding. Read the rest of this entry »

This piece is from La Pasión Según San Marcos, by the contemporary composer Osvaldo Golijov. Schola Cantorum de Venezuela. Orquesta Sinfónica Simón Bolívar.  Directora, María Guinand

I am on the road and forgot to send this personally to my friends here at VN, so I am posting this here as an fyi:

My jazz fusion band, Matias-Rocha y Nueva Trova is playing tonight and tomorrow at Twins Jazz on U street in Washington D.C. We play two sets from 9 to a little after midnight. I hope to meet some of you there, if you show up, be sure to come up and say hi.

Sorry about the self-promotion, but hopefully this gives a chance to meet personally, for those who are interested and able.

The Distributist Review has launched a new site.  Bookmark it.  Visit it.  Enjoy it.

The cry of an Iraqi boy upon the arrival of American soldiers seems appropriate to note our national day of independence.  Perhaps with that now old cry we can finally end some of the pretensions we keep ourselves under here.  One of those pretensions is that we are a Christian nation.  Another pretension is that we are basically a good society.  Another pretension is that our society has moved beyond class. Read the rest of this entry »

The House of Representatives approved another bill yesterday attempting to restore expiring unemployment benefits.   The Senate still cannot get a bill passed.  Those voting against in the House are here.  Republicans are in italics.  Independents are underlined.  In the Wisconsin delegation, Paul Ryan and Jim Sensenbrenner voted against the bill.  Paul Ryan has a closed GM plant in his district.  Janesville’s unemployment rate is 10.4%, down from 12.8% in April.

I believe that von Balthasar said somewhere that with Mozart’s piano concerti we have wonderful artistic analogues to the exchange that takes place in the communio of the Trinitarian God.

Following up on Henry’s recent offering of Sir John Tavener on Mozart, I offer for all our readers the 2nd movement of the master’s final piano concerto.

Enjoy!

In the Senate there is a bill in limbo for continuing unemployment benefits.  Prior to the depression we’ve experienced, unemployment benefits ended at 26 weeks.  These benefits had been extended.  In some states they were up to 99 weeks.  By not passing this bill, roughly 1.3 million people will stop receiving unemployment assistance almost immediately.  This is happening in a time where many states have unemployment rates exceeding 10%.  This bill which would continue unemployment benefits failed a cloture vote.  I compiled a year ago a list of Senators that supported the bailout of Wall Street executives and opposed supporting autoworkers and workers employed at auto suppliers. Among those people, these are the one’s voting for the unemployed to eat cake.

Read the rest of this entry »

The gospel today was quite interesting to me.  For those attending children at the time, we meet two men that desire to follow Jesus.  One is rebuked for wanting to bury his father before becoming a disciple.  The other is rebuked for wanting to wish his parents farewell.  The first reading today is of Elisha being called by God.  Elisha desires to wish his parents farewell.  Elisha is allowed to so do so however, and having done so, he follows Elijah, although he does sacrifice his oxen.  With “Here I Am Lord” still in my head, I don’t think I had difficulty understanding the message father was trying to impart this morning. Read the rest of this entry »

Politics gets a bad name for itself.  Too often it is just cynically dismissed.  Political cynicism is one of those bipartisan values.  It’s embraced by moderates and reactionaries.  I certainly do understand the frustrations, having fallen into the temptation myself.  While we can entertain a myriad of logical possibilities toward solving our societal problems in our ideological sanctuaries, politics smothers those possibilities into metaphysical ones that aren’t always inclusive of our fifth preference, let alone our first. Read the rest of this entry »

There seems to be an underlying assumption that the US would be better off if more people rented and fewer people owned dwellings.  Often folks point to places like Europe where it isn’t unusual for the middle class to rent their dwellings.  Many people will point to economic incentives like the mortgage interest deduction while neglecting to note that price to rent ratios already indicated a significant discount for renters for comparable properties.  The magic factor that makes renting in Europe more attractive than renting in the US is regulation favorable to renters.  But a recent study by a George Mason university economics hack claimed that it was unenlightened to think that housing regulations could do anything but add cost.  A conundrum.

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…from the Quartet for the End of Time.

Just has the most skillful physicians carefully consider the causes of disease, and thus strive to arrest it with the help of their expertise, in the same way, in my view, the God of all looks within our mind and heart and investigates the causes of the passions within us, and thus checks the diseased mind with appropriate remedies. He charges the people of Israel, therefore, on the basis of prosperity, with falling victim to forgetting the one who provided them with everything necessary for life and all that was likely to shed the light of knowledge.

[...]

There was always, in fact, such sufficient enjoyment and conceitedness through unexpected honors as to cause you to forget God and enable the human mind to descend to every possible irregularity. In my view, Israel would have become sufficiently liable to accusation for kicking over the traces and finding in the extent of its prosperity an occasion for such a dire ailment; and when they overcame nations, with the help of the God who is all-powerful, they contracted arrogance, attributing somehow to themselves, and not to the God who protected them, the splendor of their achievements.

Luxurious living is therefore risky and difficult to manage, and is, as it were, a slippery path to apostasy from God; far better is moderate tribulation.

St Cyril of Alexandria, “Commentary on Hosea 13″ in Commentary on the Twelve Prophets, Volume I. trans. Robert C. Hill (Washington, DC: CUA Press, 2007), 240-1.

Honda resolved a two-week strike at a transmission plant in southern China by offering 1,900 workers there raises of 24 to 32 percent.

But the success of that walkout, which ended a week ago, seems to have prompted additional strikes at a time when workers in China are awakening to the idea of collective bargaining and demanding higher wages.

New York Times

This is just terrible news.  This means that some capitalist will be forced to suffer and might have to walk his own dog rather than employing the services of a dog walker.  It will also make the workers lazy and unproductive.  Does China really want to look like Detroit?  When will people learn that socialism is wrong?

Yesterday was the feast of St. Justin Martyr.  A famous quote to re-ponder:

We have been taught that Christ is the firsborn of God, and we have proclaimed that he is the Logos, in whom every race of people have shared.  And those who love according to the Logos are Christians, even though they may have been counted as atheists – such as Socrates and Heraclitus, and others like them, among the Greeks…Whatever either lawyers or philosophers have said well, was articulated by finding and reflecting upon some aspect of the Logos…. Whatever all people have said well belongs to us Christians…. For all writers were able to see the truth darkly, on account of the implanted seed of the Logos which was grafted into them.

The Ochlophobist is a convert to Orthodoxy.  He isn’t hesitant to criticize the Americanization of Orthodoxy.  Here he addresses it with Catholicism, using as his foil Fr. Jay Scott Newman’s piece on Evangelical Catholicism.  A brief tease:

The religious psychology behind the “personal relationship with the Lord Jesus” is among the most interesting religious phenomena in modernity. The notion of the “personal relationship with the Lord Jesus” asserts an unmediated personal relationship between the believer and Jesus, but as we have seen this relationship is in fact mediated via a host of rituals and ritual language. Yet, like the Quaker whose Quaker meetings follow a near exact routine 99.8% of the time, we have a religious psychology here which fervently expresses an intention to deny the role of any ritual in mediating the relationship between the believer and Jesus (in the case of Evangelical Catholicism and Byzantine Rite Evangelicalism the stress is put on the ritual only rightly existing for those who have this Evangelical approach to the faith, as we will see below, and the inference that the ritual cannot be approached rightly unless the ‘heart work’ is done first — there is some truth to this, of course; God save us from things that have some truth). In classic evangelicalism this anti-ritual intent is indeed ritually expressed, such as the mention, frequent and routine, in services of how one cannot be saved via rituals, and a whole sub-lingo of anti-ritualism, the repetitive use of which in religious services is itself ritualistic. In those cases where Evangelicalism has been imported into Catholicism or Orthodoxy there is not an overt anti-ritualism, but there remains either a soft assertion or a clear enough inference that the unmediated “Gospel” oriented “personal relationship with the Lord Jesus” soteriologically precedes the role of ritual acts in mediating God to man. Beyond the anti-ritual aspects of this religious psychology, there is the positive assertion and/or intuition that to engage in these deemed non-ritual ritual acts of the “personal relationship with the Lord Jesus” is to actually engage directly with the Lord Jesus. Oftentimes this is sad yet humourous. So often when you listen to the prayers of a person who has a “personal relationship with the Lord Jesus” you find that the content of those prayers consists mostly of assertions to (reminders to) Jesus of Who He is, which, of course, inevitably mimics the conceptualization of Jesus that the believer (and usually his community of believers) wants Jesus to be, and this form of prayer essentially serves to convince the believer that he or she has a “personal relationship with the Lord Jesus” by means of the mental and emotional construction of a Jesus whom the believer “relates” to by way of those acts which construct said Jesus. Does this sound circular? It is.

Seems the Jesuits are at it again, rejecting the true and authentic teaching of the Church.  Fr. Michael Kelly, Jesuit CEO of the Asian Catholic news agency UCA News has this to say about the doctrine of transubstantiation:

Regrettably, all too frequently, the only Presence focused on is Christ’s presence in the elements of bread and wine. Inadequately described as the change of the “substance” (not the “accidents”) of bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ, the mystery of the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist carries the intellectual baggage of a physics no one accepts. Aristotelian physics makes such nice, however implausible and now unintelligible, distinctions. They are meaningless in the post-Newtonian world of quantum physics, which is the scientific context we live in today.

I think it might be helpful to break this quote down, not simply possibly to absolve Fr. Kelly, but to try to get at what he is trying to say.   Read the rest of this entry »

I’m not going to have much to add here.  I figured I’d add some speculations.

1.  Abortion is typically an outpatient procedure.  This isn’t South America.  Catholic hospitals don’t need to create excuses for performing abortions.  If a person wants to have an abortion in this country, there are facilities that will perform them, no questions asked.  The fact that the person who had the abortion was inpatient and approval had to be sought by a committee should be sufficient evidence that immediate medical conditions required prompt action.   “News” sources that speculate contrariwise are acting irresponsibly unless they have solid evidence.  If they quote a doctor claiming such circumstances never present themselves and from that he renders judgment in a case he has not reviewed, the doctor is committing professional malfeasance.  Read the rest of this entry »

One of the central theses of Richard Dawkins and his “new atheist” confreres is that God is a delusional projection of the human psyche.  This is no new argument, but is an especially pervasive one that carries a lot of weight in our psychological age.  To a vaguely curious and interested listener, it offers a certain plausibility.  To be clear, this is by no means Dawkins’ only or even most important argument.  In his preface to The Blind Watchmaker he claims that human beings are conditioned to see elegance as premeditated design.  He goes on: “This is probably the most powerful reason for the belief, held by the vast majority of people that have ever lived, in some kind of supernatural deity.”  There is a connection, however, between the “no design in nature” argument and the “God delusion” argument.  Both are based on an illusion fabricated by the human brain.  “God” comes from an ancient desire to see purpose working in our world.  According to River Out of Eden, man looked around himself and saw many artifacts and then “projected” the same kind of purpose onto nature.

In The God Delusion it works a little differently. Dawkins uses the example of a moth – along with his Feuerbachian mirror book cover – to drive home his point.  A moth navigates its way by means of the parallel beams of the moon’s light in order to fly a straight line.  It is wired to use these beams as a navigational guide.  Along with the creation of artificial light, however, the moth, continuing to use its nature given navigational device, now ends up flying straight into an artificial light. Read the rest of this entry »

Paul and John seem to disagree with regards to the authority of government. In Romans 13:1-7, Paul says:

1 Let every person be subordinate to the higher authorities, for there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been established by God. 2 Therefore, whoever resists authority opposes what God has appointed, and those who oppose it will bring judgment upon themselves. 3 For rulers are not a cause of fear to good conduct, but to evil. Do you wish to have no fear of authority? Then do what is good and you will receive approval from it, 4 for it is a servant of God for your good. But if you do evil, be afraid, for it does not bear the sword without purpose; it is the servant of God to inflict wrath on the evildoer. 5 Therefore, it is necessary to be subject not only because of the wrath but also because of conscience. 6 This is why you also pay taxes, for the authorities are ministers of God, devoting themselves to this very thing. 7 Pay to all their dues, taxes to whom taxes are due, toll to whom toll is due, respect to whom respect is due, honor to whom honor is due.

However, in Revelation 13:4-17, John writes: Read the rest of this entry »

I’d like to weigh in with some thoughts on the debate concerning the “bloodthirsty” God of the Old Testament.  In particular, Kyle here has noticed the problems that arise when reading many (not just a few) parts of the Jewish Scriptures.  He also points to the most difficult one of all for me: 1 Samuel 15.  This is important for me because I teach Scripture in a High School, and my first impulse is always just to skip passages like this one so that I don’t have to deal with them.  But then I always correct myself with the realization that someday someone might bring this up to one of my students and ask why God used to be so bloody and then suddenly got nice with Jesus.  The big problem verse is 3: “Go, now, attack Amalek, and deal with him and all that he has under the ban. Do not spare him, but kill men and women, children and infants, oxen and sheep, camels and asses.”  Can God really ask someone to kill men, women and child, innocent and guilty? Read the rest of this entry »

One of the distressing things about being on Facebook is seeing what people think.  There is a gross hostility to Mexicans in particular and Hispanics in general.  People will claim that their hostility only extends to illegal immigrants, but that is nonsense.  In my area, we have a number of Laotian (Hmong) refugees.  For those unfamiliar, this traces itself to the Vietnam War.  While the immigrants have made significant progress economically, I don’t believe members of the Hmong community would consider themselves significantly welcome in Wisconsin, despite our witnessing the 2nd generation coming of age now.

While one can understand that communities tend to be closed and as a consequence outsiders don’t perceive themselves as welcome, this doesn’t make a whole lot of sense in the cases of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California vis-a-vis Mexico.  Read the rest of this entry »