We Catholics think up lots of great stuff, we do.  For example, some nuns in Arkansas were just excommunicated for following the Army of Mary.   This here Army has attracted a whole lot of attention and keeps getting in trouble with Rome. 

Fascinating really.  I mean, from a religious perspective–this is all about authority and the idea that certain people control religious revelation, or, at least can gauged when that revelation is valid, and then, even when that revelation must be believed.   It’s a socioligist’s dream, really.

Excommunication bars the nuns from participating in the church liturgy and receiving the Eucharist, or Holy Communion, and other sacraments.

The diocese said the action was taken after the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith issued a declaration dated July 11 that the Army of Mary’s teachings were heretical and automatically excommunicated any who embraced the doctrine.

According to the Catholic News Service, the Army of Mary was founded in Quebec in 1971 by Giguere, who said she was receiving visions from God.

Dionne said she did not know if Giguere was the reincarnation of the Virgin Mary but said she believed God communicated through the sect’s founder.

A spokesman for the Army of Mary called the excommunication of the nuns and the other members of the sect an injustice.

Father Eric Roy said Giguere had not claimed to be the reincarnation of the Virgin Mary, and the Quebec woman, he said, “receives graces” from the Virgin Mary and God.

So, as a strereotypical man, I don’t much care what you’re wearing really, but I do appreciate the aesthetics of looking good.  It is pleasing and, you could even argue, ethical, to make sure beauty exists in the world, and that includes the beauty of what we wear.

Beauty matters.  I think that’s fair to say.  And so does dignity, and so it matters that we wear clothes that manifest beauty and dignity, just as it’s important that our actions reflect this as well.  But, as always, I think there’s a middle ground.  It’s good to care about looking good, but I would say it’s wrong to want to look “better”–that ceases being about beauty and dignity and starts being about status.

And let’s be honest: a lot of clothes look basically the same, and when they do look the same, it becomes a status thing, a competition, an assertion that because I wear this or do this, I am better than you, who does not–or cannot–wear this.   So is fashion important and meaningful?  Sure, of course.  So is sculpture.  But just as a lot of people own sculpture to show how “refined” they are rather than as a means of any inherent attraction to the art, so people mostly use fashion as a means of one-upmanship.

So is she actually wearing that?  Sure, why not? Get over yourself.  Anyways, I wrote about this before for killingthebuddha and here’s an interesting NYT article:

It is almost endearing to hear fashion gurus talk about empowering women (as Mr. Manuel did), building their confidence (as Ms. Webb did) or dressing them from the inside out (as Mr. Kressley did) when what they may really be doing is reinforcing a stereotype that people who do not embrace fashion are somehow emotionally deficient, while promoting their own interests as paid endorsers of watches, credit cards, jewelry lines and Web sites.

The gurus counter that dressing fashionably can change an outlook, making a person feel better, or at least less frustrated if not exactly fabulous.

“We don’t make them over,” Ms. Webb said. “We show them how to make themselves into what they want to be.”

But some gurus acknowledge that there is a darker side to the profession. Gretta Monahan, an owner of several spas and a fashion boutique in Boston who appears regularly on the Rachael Ray show to talk about fashion, considered giving up television in 2005, when a show she was the host of on TLC ended.

“The deal was, unless I was willing to basically take a civilian, a nice woman, and take her down in a style that was cutting and demanding, then I couldn’t go on,” Ms. Monahan said. “I just refused.”

Mr. Verdi, too, knowingly plays into a stereotype, using a piece of what people expect gay men to be to further his career.

“It has both helped me and hurt me,” he said, sounding in need of a makeover himself. “We are seen as queer mistrals, as if we are neutered in some intellectual way. I wanted to evolve into doing general entertainment coverage, but that part of my career has been challenging at best. I don’t want to live in the ghetto of being a gay style person.”

Here:

You ignore the best of religion and instead . . . “you attack crude, rabble-rousing chancers like Ted Haggard, Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, rather than facing up to sophisticated theologians like Bonhoeffer or the Archbishop of Canterbury.”

If subtle, nuanced religion predominated, the world would be a better place and I would have written a different book. The melancholy truth is that decent, understated religion is numerically negligible. Most believers echo Robertson, Falwell or Haggard, Osama bin Laden or Ayatollah Khomeini. These are not straw men. The world needs to face them, and my book does so.

And here:

I never tire of emphasising how much we don’t know. The God Delusion ends in just such a theme. Where do the laws of physics come from? How did the universe begin? Scientists are working on these deep problems, honestly and patiently. Eventually they may be solved. Or they may be insoluble. We don’t know.

But whereas I and other scientists are humble enough to say we don’t know, what of theologians like McGrath? He knows. He’s signed up to the Nicene Creed. The universe was created by a very particular supernatural intelligence who is actually three in one. Not four, not two, but three. Christian doctrine is remarkably specific: not only with cut-and-dried answers to the deep problems of the universe and life, but about the divinity of Jesus, about sin and redemption, heaven and hell, prayer and absolute morality. And yet McGrath has the almighty gall to accuse me of a “glossy”, “quick fix”, naive faith that science has all the answers.

Other theologies contradict the Christian creed while matching it for brash overconfidence based on zero evidence. McGrath presumably rejects the polytheism of the Hindus, Olympians and Vikings. He does not subscribe to voodoo, or to any of thousands of mutually contradictory tribal beliefs. Is McGrath an “ideological fanatic” because he doesn’t believe in Thor’s hammer? Of course not. Why, then, does he suggest I am exactly that because I see no reason to believe in the particular God whose existence he, lacking both evidence and humility, positively asserts?

Someone did research on it, so it must be true.

Call it the Walmart problem:  So cheap!  But are the labor practices unethical?  What about supporting the local economy?  What about third-world workers?

But so cheap!   Oh, so very cheap!

So we’re of two minds: we’re consumers but we’re also citizens.  It’s a real debate, and it’s sketched well here:

The awkward truth is that most of us are two minds: As consumers and investors we want the great deals. As citizens we don’t like many of the social consequences that flow from them. The system of democratic capitalism in the Not Quite Golden Age struck a very different balance. Then, as consumers and investors we didn’t do nearly as well; as citizens we fared better.

What’s the right balance? Are our gains as consumers and investors worth the price we’re now paying for them? We have no real way to tell. The old institutions of democratic capitalism, and the negotiations that took place within them, are gone. But no new institutions have emerged to replace them. We have no means of balancing. Our desires as consumers and investors usually win out because our values as citizens have virtually no effective means of expression — other than in heated rhetoric directed against the wrong targets. This is the real crisis of democracy in the age of supercapitalism.

Don’t get me wrong.  It’s still a big deal–the US bishops gave up a lot of ground.  I still don’t think it’s going to be nearly enough to keep the Anglicans together, however.

That the US bishops have gone as far as they have represents a triumph for the strategy of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, who addressed them in private on Thursday and Friday of last week. It is also a tribute to the leadership of the US Presiding Bishop, Katharine Jefferts Schori. Their decisions will come as a blow to gay rights advocates with the Church. A lesbian bishop is on the shortlist of candidates for another diocese, Chicago, and the decision represents an end to any hopes of her becoming the second openly gay bishop in the US.

Nevertheless, the US bishops also stated their “unequivocal support” for civil rights for lesbian, gay and transgender people. The bishops also intend to continue consecrating openly gay priests. But they described a “deep desire” to rebuild trust with the other provinces of the Anglican Communion.

“This is what we are called to in our baptism,” they said. And they urged Dr Williams to find a way to invite Bishop Robinson to the 2008 Lambeth Conference.

From Pew.

If nothing else, read Wikipedia!  Come on folks, we’ve all got religious ignorance, but at least learn a bit.

Most Americans say they know little to nothing about the practices of Islam and Mormonism but say their own religious beliefs have little in common with either of these faiths, according to a national survey released Tuesday.

Forty-five percent of those polled said Islam was more likely than other religions to encourage violence among its believers. Nearly 1 in 3 respondents say Mormonism is not a Christian religion, the report said.

The survey of 3,002 Americans was conducted last month by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press and the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life.

Although 58% of respondents said they knew little or nothing about Islamic practices, 70% of non-Muslims said Islam was very different from their own religious beliefs.

Pew Forum senior fellow John Green said that respondents’ knowledge of Islam might be even lower than the survey results suggested. Respondents “tend to overestimate their own knowledge, so these figures may well underestimate their lack of knowledge,” he said.

The survey found that public attitudes toward Muslims have grown more negative in recent years, with 35% of respondents expressing an unfavorable view. In 2002, the figure was 29%. Respondents who knew a Muslim or who were college graduates were more likely to express positive views about Islam.

Climate Change Causes Bloodshed!!!!

So. temperature creates death: animals cannibalize and humans kill each other.   This article links climate change over the past 2000 or so years with wars in China, finding that in periods of scant resources, there were more wars, and people died, thus thinning out the need for people to have more resources.

I mean, isn’t that obvious?  If there are limited resources, people are going to use whatever strategies possible to gain access to them.  I’m not sure why this is big news.

We’re always more impressed when religious people enter politics, because we hope that they’re there because of devout, transcendent reasons and not simply for their own political gain.

Of course, the human heart rarely has such simple binaries, but that is the way we process the human heart, and how we understand others.  So when a priest says something, or a monk, or a nun, or a minister, or a rabbi, or a sheik, it’s harder to just ignore it.  It’s harder to say, oh that’s just a lust for power talking.  This person doesn’t really care.

Add to that the iconography of religion: A priest wearing a cassock and marching against arms (Romero, or, the movie, The Mission) .  And the monks of Myanmar, in their bright-colored robes, refusing to be quiet.

Of course, the problem is that religion can often be manipulated for this very reason.  Witness Catholic, Jewish, Muslim, Evangelical Christian, Buddhist, Hindu manipulations of religious imagery and religious power structures.   So religion is a powerful witness; and because of this, and because of its ability to be manipulated, it’s a dangerous one.

Stories like these of the monks give me hope, but they  also make me nervous.

Sure, his politics are now suspect.  But what a poet.

A quote of his, from the poem Ash Wednesday, that I think of often:

Because I know that time is always time
And place is always and only place
And what is actual is actual only for one time
And only for one place
I rejoice that things are as they are and
I renounce the blessèd face
And renounce the voice
Because I cannot hope to turn again
Consequently I rejoice, having to construct something
Upon which to rejoice

And pray to God to have mercy upon us
And pray that I may forget
These matters that with myself I too much discuss
Too much explain
Because I do not hope to turn again
Let these words answer
For what is done, not to be done again
May the judgement not be too heavy upon us