Because theology rocks! (Sorry.  It had to be done.  Anyways, h/t to Commonweal).

The guy (Richard Williamson) was not originally excommunicated for being a Holocaust-denier, he was excommunicated for refusing Vatican II.  And then he was brought back as a means of reconciliation, it just so happening that he denies the Holocaust (or its extent anyways.)  Could we bracket that and say, okay, you’re welcome back to the Church, but now that you’re here, you’re officially sanctioned and silenced (or put under threat of re-excommunication) because of what you’ve said about our friends the Jews?  Just a thought.

Read more here and here.

This morning, Benedict made his first public comments on the controversy, telling pilgrims in his weekly audience in Vatican City that he feels “full and indisputable” solidarity with Jews and repudiating the idea of denying the Holocaust.

According to an Associated Press account of his remarks, Benedict said the memory of the Holocaust should “prompt humanity to reflect on the unpredictable power of evil when it conquers the hearts of men.”

Here’s the thing: a lot of people under 40 in the wide world of literature don’t like Updike much. They think he’s misogynist, too self-important, too much concerned with the pedantry of beautiful prose rather than the emotional truth of relationships. And I’d agree with a lot of that, but, at the same time, he’s great for epiphanies and deep spiritual truth and the colossal pain that comes, honestly, from being the kind of self-absorbed punk that Rabbit was and that Updike often portrayed. And that’s a pain I’m sure most of us, at least on some level, know well. Reading Rabbit at Rest, I literally touched the book out of empathy with Rabbit–I was on a bus and I’m sure I looked like an idiot, but I felt such a need to connect that I could’t do anything else. And so I’m very sad that Updike’s gone.

NYT articles here and here and a reflection on Updike’s religiosity here at Commonweal (along with a great poem).

This is a great reflection from one of my favorite science bloggers.  Look, here’s the deal: science matters, and it’s necessary, and it’s information we can’t ignore.  But that’s where it stops: as information.  The globe is warming, for example.  This is human’s fault.  This might cause the deaths of various species and cause a lot of destruction and economic problems to humanity.  But that’s not bad or good.  We might call it bad (I would, certainly), but science won’t.  At lesat, good science won’t.  It just gives us information.  That’s why society’s values are so important:

Science should function in society and government much as it does when properly used in medicine. It cannot tell society what it values, but it can provide it with estimates of the likely outcomes of various courses between which society must choose. Take the example of second hand smoke. Science tells us that it increases the risk of heart and lung disease by a factor of approximately 1.3 in workers exposed to it eight or more hours a day. What we as a society do with that information depends upon what we value. Do we value the autonomy of the bar and restaurant owner more than the modestly increased risk of disease in nonsmokers who work in that owners’ bar or restaurant? Or do we value protecting workers from this risk more than the freedom of patrons to smoke and bar owners to choose to allow smoking in their bars? That is the political decision based on our values as a society

This will be the book!

What this book does do and does very persuasively is chart the rise and fall of one of baseball’s great dynasties, while showing the care and feeding it took to bring the city of New York four championships in five years. “There exists a mythology that the championship Yankees teams under Torre operated on autopilot, blissfully riding their talent and their will to preordained titles,” the authors write. “No team requires no care.”

They continue: “The championship teams required their own maintenance, from, among others, the insecurities of Chuck Knoblauch, to the immaturity of David Wells, to the self-critical nature of Tino Martinez, to the overflow intensity of Paul O’Neill, to the neediness of Roger Clemens, and to the overbearing intrusion and influence of George Steinbrenner. Greatness is the ability to mask the difficulty of a task — to make the difficult appear easy. Those Yankees teams epitomized greatness.”

This is a great reflection on Haight and the values of silence:

In this way, Roger, whose ideas I share only somewhat, is all the more one of my intellectual heroes. We need to think and write honestly, as if everything is at stake, no matter what the cost. Roger’s doing this, and taking all this so seriously (as has the Vatican, to be sure), upgrades the value of what all theologians do, and reminds us of what is at stake in our daily thinking, writing, praying, teaching. It is important enough to fight about, and to suffer for.
I do hope the silencing ends soon, even as Roger’s tapas, the fruit of his silence, sets us all ablaze. But for now, what he does not say has become the most eloquent way for him to keep teaching us.

Letting a Holocaust denier back into the fold?  I’m not sure about this.

“In welcoming an open Holocaust denier into the Catholic Church without any recantation on his part, the Vatican has made a mockery of John Paul II’s moving and impressive repudiation and condemnation of anti-Semitism,” he said.

Elan Steinberg, vice president of the American Gathering of Holocaust Survivors and their Descendants, spoke of “an act of moral debasement unworthy of a moral institution.”

Abe Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League said: “What was the imperative to bring these people back into the Church at such a high cost to the Jewish people?”

Diplomatic sources said the row could put the pope’s planned trip to the Holy Land in May in doubt.

Why isn’t it doing so well in India? It’s a good question, and an important one.  After all, there are lots of African Americans who are frustrated with how black character are portrayed in movies, lots of inner-city teachers who will assure you they are not fighting knives out of people’s hands everyday.  So I’m sympathetic to the question of portrayals.

“The majority of viewers — the small-town moviegoer, the urban, Hindi-speaking market — looks for star vehicles, for masala,” says Masand, “They won’t care much for this one.” For many Indians, the film’s subject and treatment are familiar to the point of being banal. A lot of Indians are not keen to watch it for the same reason they wouldn’t want to go to Varanasi or Pushkar for a holiday — it’s too much reality for what should be entertainment. “We see all this every day,” says Shikha Goyal, a Mumbai-based PR executive who left halfway through the film. “You can’t live in Mumbai without seeing children begging at traffic lights and passing by slums on your way to work. But I don’t want to be reminded of that on a Saturday evening.” There is also a sense of injured national pride, especially for a lot of well-heeled metro-dwellers, who say the film peddles “poverty porn” and “slum voyeurism.”

The Sea and Cake. They’re great.

I agree that science can do things that most religions can’t, but I pretty much reject the concept of “religion” anyways, since it means so many different things to so many different people, and the idea that religion ought to exist n a separate sphere from religion is a completely liberal view of humanity.  It’s a view I share, but it doesn’t need to be this way.  Of course, empirically, medicine is the only way to cure certain illnesses.  That’s pretty obviously true.  What’s not obvious though is the way one conceptulaizes this process, the way one orients and discovers the sacred, with or without or against science, and the idea that there is a right or wrong way to do this with our without science seems suspect to me.  Anyways, an interesting article on faith healing.

I don’t know how the case will turn out. But the more important thing to communicate to parents is that this is bad religion. Science is a way of grappling with what we can know empirically. Religion is a way of grappling with what we can’t. Each of these disciplines must recognize its limits and defer, beyond that, to its counterpart. Properly understood, there’s nothing unscientific about religion, and there’s nothing irreligious about science.

I’m not saying the distinction is perfectly clean. It isn’t. Sometimes religion and science have to work together. But it’s crucial to ask which kind of question you’re facing. Healing is a physical phenomenon. Can faith influence it? Yes. Look at the latest study on acupuncture: It sometimes works, apparently because patients believe in it. But what happens when people pray for your recovery without you knowing about it? Answer: Nothing. Belief, not God, is the medically salient factor.