A book review: (h/t A&L)

Obsession: a History is not so much a book about a disease as a “disease entity” — the name Davis gives to the pattern of real and fancied symptoms, hard facts and lurid conjecture by which an illness is identified, treated and feared. Obsession itself was not recognised as a mental aberration until relatively late; it emerged, Davis demonstrates, out of a confusion of adjacent disorders.

In the 18th century, a dismal quartet of ailments — spleen, vapours, melancholy and hypochondria — composed what was known as the English Malady. Alongside a general ennui, intractable sadness and terror, various tics and chronic digestive trouble, sufferers such as James Boswell and Samuel Johnson noted the patient’s tendency to fixate on a single theme or pursue a train of thought until it turned perversely and ruinously absorbing.

By the early decades of the 19th century, such ideas were considered symptoms of a specific pathology. In 1810 the physician Jean-Étienne Esquirol named it “momomania”: a form of partial insanity that left the patient rational but helpless to stop himself reasoning in the wrong direction. Poets and painters, Esquirol believed, were especially susceptible to this form of heightened but misdirected attention.

If you wanna see.

It’s sad:

When the Diocese of Brooklyn last week proposed closing 14 more elementary schools, it was not the deepest but only the latest of a thousand cuts suffered, one tearful closing announcement at a time, as enrollment in the nation’s Catholic schools has steadily dropped by more than half from its peak of five million 40 years ago.

But recently, after years of what frustrated parents describe as inertia in the church hierarchy, a sense of urgency seems to be gripping many Catholics who suddenly see in the shrinking enrollment a once unimaginable prospect: a country without Catholic schools.

From Ross, who’s smart:

Obviously the words “public and detailed case” and “Dick Cheney” don’t exactly go hand in hand. Obviously the notion that the American Presidency needs to operate secretly in many of these matters is central to the now ex-veep’s political worldview. “A lot of the details are still obviously classified,” he said, when pressed by Jim Lehrer to describe exactly what sort of information we gained from the “high-value” interrogations, and it’s clear that he expects to be offering that answer for many years to come. But at the moment, it also seems clear that by avoiding a deep and detailed public engagement with the argument over torture, he’s ensuring that his side will lose it. And based on his own accounting of the stakes involved, he ought to be willing - nay, eager - to compromise his beliefs about what information from the Bush years can and should be made public in the short term in order to win the political argument about whether the administration’s policies should be continued.

at least, they’re sitting at the Hold Steady table.

Are the Counting Crows cooler than any of us realized? First the Gaslight Anthem quote Adam Duritz’s “wish I looked like Elvis” line on their ridiculously great  song “High Lonesome”, and then the long-maligned dreaded-up dorm-rockers announced that they’d be bringing the Hold Steady on tour with them in the UK and Ireland.

Sweet Lord it’s a long book, but it’s really good and unbelievably funny.  I know it’s a satire, but some of the gender and race stuff–even viewed satirically–still looks pretty inapporpriate right now (his stuff on race can be almost totally justified satirically, but his stuff on gender is a bit of a harder sell).  This sometimes makes the book hard to read.  But it’s larger point is fantastic: a sort-of cynicism about progress, but a desire to be aware of the yearn-for-goodness even as we continue in our broken world.  In some ways, the book fits in alongside all the other 60’s-era utopias, like Stranger in a Strange Land, etc, but its also an intense parody of them.  The book’s great.

There weren’t that many of them.  Worriers be darned. 

Bush seems intent on clearing out of town without the cloud of controversy that descended on President Bill Clinton after he issued a series of last-minute pardons before leaving office in 2001. Clinton’s pardon of billionaire financier Marc Rich, who was considered a fugitive by the Justice Department, triggered a Congressional investigation and public scolding even from Democrats.

Some Democrats and civil liberties activists feared that Bush might issue a sweeping pardon blocking future prosecutions over alleged torture of war-on-terror detainees but those concerns appear to have been unwarranted.

There also were no last-minute pardons for political allies or former aides, such as I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby Jr., who was convicted in 2007 of obstruction of justice in the CIA leak investigation. The lack of a pardon disappointed many of Libby’s backers.

On the Archbishop of Canterbury, who is theologically more orthodox than most would believe:

In Rowan’s Rule, Shortt sets out to provide Rowan’s critics with a true measure of the man, attempting to relate both the substance of his thought and the story of his life. Shortt is that rarest of breeds—a religion journalist who knows what he is talking about—and he succeeds brilliantly in his project, showing both that Williams is well worth listening to and that many of his critics may not have listened to him closely enough.

From the right, Williams has come under heavy fire for his supposed theological liberalism and typically Anglican wishy-washiness. To a certain extent, such criticisms are unavoidable. Williams is in fact in favor of women’s ordination, his revisionist position on same-sex relations is on record, and his understanding of Scripture has drawn objections from many, not only evangelicals. If that were the end of the story, Williams would seem to be no more than a conventional liberal, along the lines of the average Episcopal bishop. But as Shortt shows, nothing could be further from the truth.

In fact, Williams is best viewed as part of the rebellion against the rebellion of the 1970s, working alongside his colleagues Oliver O’Donovan and N.T. Wright to bring the Church of England away from the arid liberalism of Honest to God and Don Cupitt and back to its roots in Word and sacrament, prayer and worship, tradition and Nicene-Chalcedonian orthodoxy. While many of his professors busied themselves with demythologizing the gospels and re-presenting Christian doctrine as anthropology, Williams insisted that Christianity at its core is answerable to God’s initiative, and most particularly so in the unique revelation of the life, death, and resurrection of Christ.

Geez, this is depressing:

What is happening in traditional universities where the ethos of the liberal arts is still given lip service is the forthright policy of for-profit universities, which make no pretense of valuing what used to be called the “higher learning.” John Sperling, founder of the group that gave us Phoenix University, is refreshingly blunt: “Coming here is not a rite of passage. We are not trying to develop value systems or go in for that ‘expand their minds’” nonsense.

The for-profit university is the logical end of a shift from a model of education centered in an individual professor who delivers insight and inspiration to a model that begins and ends with the imperative to deliver the information and skills necessary to gain employment.

In this latter model , the mode of delivery – a disc, a computer screen, a video hook-up – doesn’t matter so long as delivery occurs. Insofar as there are real-life faculty in the picture, their credentials and publications (if they have any) are beside the point, for they are just “delivery people.”

Sperling understands the difficulty of achieving accreditation for his institution as a proxy “for cultural battles between defenders of 800 years of educational (and largely religious) traditions, and innovation that was based on the ideas of the marketplace – transparency, efficiency, productivity and accountability.”

An attack on the Catholic commitment to keeping babies alive.  I understand how unqualified I am to talk about the pain of this child and the incredibly difficult life his family has because of this child’s condition.  I wonder though if we’re ever justified in stopping a human life once its created.  The question, I suppose, is when a life becomes human.  The Catholic Church has a pretty clear answer to this, but I know that respectable people disagree.  Also, as some of the comments indicate, there are other options besides total abstinence and screening the children one has.  Still, a haunting picture:

The firstborn is still alive, after heroic medical interventions, aged nine. But he is in a home, needing round the clock nursing. The detail of his illness that stays with me is this: at one stage he had acid reflux so badly that the juices coming up from his stomach stripped the enamel from his teeth – and this is a child to whom one could never explain what has happening.

…

It is stories like this that make Catholic bioethics repugnant to me. I can understand the opposition to abortion, though in this case I can’t really imagine anyone agreeing with it. But when it comes to embryos the line seems insane. To oppose the kind of research that led to these embryos being screened, or the kind of technique which allows such a mother to have a healthy child seems to me quite simply wicked.