I’m grateful for the many comments we’ve gotten on this blog.  I’d like to respond to Stef’s concerns about the Catholic caferteria via a brief discussion of the nature of reason:

I agree that moral relativism is a real problem, and that disagreeing with the Church shouldn’t be done casually.  However, I also believe that we are the Church of faith and reason–and I’m honestly not sure the opposition to my position is best articulated by an argument by authority, that is the Pope says it, so it must be true.  If that were the case, then the Popes could have just written three words in their defense: I am right, instead of long and brilliant encycicals (by the way, I have read Theology of the Body, as well as JP2’s Fides et Ratio).

I’m not talking about the difficulty of taking things on faith–like the Real presence or the Resurrection.  You either believe in those or you don’t.  And I believe, because I’ve chosen to.  But other arguments–like those on condoms and homosexuality especially–are rooted in reason, and reason can go right or wrong.  In this case, I think the church has gone wrong.  And as a part of the Church, I want to stay inside and guide it right.  I’m open, obviously, to correction and to being proven wrong, but being told that the Pope disagrees with me so I’m threfore wrong is not really much of an argument.

So, um, I really, really love humor about religion, most of which is making fun of religion, because I figure that if we can’t make fun of ourselves, what good are we?  I think this show–Moral Orel–is hilarious, and though I’ve only seen two episodes, so I can’t really speak about the entire show, I can say that I wish it showed, at least occasionally, how religion can be a good thing.  But that might be asking too much of a satire, whose purpose, after all, is to attack, not propose.

That’s all well and good, but the problem with satires like Moral Orel or South Park is that they wind up teaching relatively trite lessons about modern American secularism and our own visions of liberal individualism–and often these also deserve to be mocked.

Read a take here.  Blair compares the Catholic Church to political parties, which is a bit crass, even if it’s probably sociologically accurate. The difference, of course, is that parties, even if they do care about principles, have a bit more at stake in terms of keeping power, while at least the argument about institutional religion is that it cares about truth first, then power.  Now clearly that’s often not true, but it’s at least the hope in a way that such hope can’t exist in politics.  

Anyways, his point on homosexuals is pretty solid.  Thanks to some great comments on a lot of the previous postings about homosexuality, particularly those that call to question whether the ban on gay acts is “natural”.  I think there’s a ton of compelling evidence to question the existence of a “natural” at all barring some pretty mundane things–I think that humans are naturally selfish, afraid of heights, desirous of community in some form, averse to pain, able to recognize patterns and causation, and a few other things.  But there’s a big jump from those to a natural way to have sex, which anthropology makes pretty clear simply does not exist.  If we want to say this is how the West, or even the Catholic Church, has traditionally done something, that’s one thing, but to argue that it’s natural seems a bit off.

Mark said a few more things worth commenting on:

1. Males and females not fitting together is I suppose true from one point of view, except for the women and  men in gay relationships who think they fit just fine, thank you.  Hands don’t fit together either.  Neither do kissing lips.  So hand-holding and kissing: none of that is natural or achieves a purpose.  Yet it’s still okay, right?  Because it’s unitive.  In terms of what humans were “designed” to do, you either have to take in on authority that certain parochial Western practices are what they were designed to do or ignore the vast amount of other practices that seem obvious and normal to other cultures.

2. The woman accepting the sperm of the man is what sex is about?  What about kissing?  What about long, close hugs?  And this doesn’t even get into the many and sundry forms of sodomy that the vast amount of heterosexuals do.  And then, of course, there are the infertile couples, or those on NFP who know they won’t get pregnant on a certain day and that’s why they have sex that day.  Of course, these are all just exceptions to the rule.  I challenge the rule too: except on an argument by authority, why is sex designed for procreation first?  I don’t believe there’s a good reason.

4. Lastly, there is no good sociological evidence that gay couples raise worse kids or raise kids in an inferior way (unless you count thinking gay relationships are okay is inferior, which is fair enough, but then you’d have to ban liberals from having kids too).  I know the field pretty well, and while I’m open to being corrected, I’d be quite surprised.

Or at least trying to.  If anyone can do it, it’s Gates.  I mean, the biggest shame of the MIC is not that it increases militarization and encourages war when war is not the best answer.  That’s a huge problem, but that’s a problem from a certain vantage point others might not share.  On the Pentagon’s own terms, the current system is terrible because it’s not good for winning wars.  It’s good for getting great contracts to high level general in the Pentagon who will then get sweet gigs when they retire.  The whole thing is literally disgusting.   I use that word rarely, but I’m not sure how else one can talk about an industry that tries to make as much money as possible off of killing.  I understand the necessary evil of weapons.  I’m not a pacifist.  I have friends in the military, and I grew up around bases since my Dad was in the Air Force. But the idea of trying to make more rather than less for not protection but profit, that’s just gross.  Anyways, read more here:

Gates has signaled his frustrations with the broken and “rigid” purchasing system for months, and in a January article in Foreign Affairs magazine, he noted that the pursuit of perfect solutions combined with a lack of flexibility and innovation had made it “necessary to bypass existing institutions and procedures to get the capabilities needed to protect U.S. troops and fight ongoing wars.”

But Gates sees this year as a rare opportunity to pursue politically controversial ideas, one of his top aides said, largely because of two factors. First, President Obama’s repeated claim that procurement reforms can increase efficiency and save expenses across the government will provide “top cover” for Gates in his head-butting with a group of service chiefs that proposed last year to alleviate their woes by adding tens of billions of dollars to the budget instead of making hard choices or undertaking major reforms.

If you haven’t seen it yet, read this.

Evangelical Christians might pull out of politics, but I doubt it.  I’m not sure we’re going to see a Scopes-like evacuation of public religion in the United States for a long time.  But then, who knows?

Compromise may be the grease of politics, but it has no place in Christian orthodoxy, according to Deace.

Put another way, Christians may have no place in the political fray of dealmaking. That doesn’t mean one disengages from political life, but it might mean that the church shouldn’t be a branch of the Republican Party. It might mean trading fame and fortune (green rooms and fundraisers) for humility and charity.

We’ve got about two centuries of art to catch up on.  But that’s okay!  We can do it!  It’s frankly embarassing how provincial Catholic art has become, with certain obviously exceptions, nearly all of them literary.  Even the most interesting visual art about religion is generally about the complications of religion–stuff like Pi*s Christ, which I would argue is actually a religious, even reverent work that takes exception to how we no longer really care about Christ, and in, fact “piss” all over his message. (Serrano is an interesting case here, though, because a lot of Latin-American artists or American Latino artists use a lot of really, really cool Christian imagery).

However, the Church has an ambivalent if not all-out angatonistic relationship to modern art and modern art rarely uses religious imagery or themes anymore, despite their richness.  This might be a reflection of a much larger problem, namely the lack of relevance of the Church’s symobls and images anymore.  The degree to which the Church and Christianity in general become relevant (and not oppressive) will eqaul, I bet, the amount their images are again used in art (and not as something to attack).

Anyways, an article about this here.

I feel bad for the guys, honestly, but I thin that accountability and openness is really the best way to proceed–that’s certainly how the Legion itself runs its own seminaries anyways.  The good have nothing to hide, especially not within the family.  I don’t know if the whole world needs to know if there were dirtier details, but I think our whole Church would benefit from a strengthened, throughoughly cleaned LC.  More here:

“We have testimonies that there have been other Legionaries who followed Maciel’s example,” said Jose Barba, the legal representative of eight former Legionaries who started court proceedings against Maciel in 1998. “The ramifications of the problem exist throughout the Legionaries of Christ,” he added.

Barba, who says he was abused by Maciel when he was in the order as a teenager training to be a priest, said he expected the investigation would take months.

“What they have to investigate is to what extent the evil, the gangrene was spread through the Legionaries of Christ and didn’t end just because Father Maciel died,” Barba said.

Read by Chares Wright, one of the best religion-friendly poets around.  It’s right here.

Maybe.  That’s what this poll says, anyways.  But it’s my hunch that we Catholics are actually just more understanding and forgiving–we see the universe as bigger and more complicated than simple right and wrongs, which makes it hard for us to be interviewed in surveys.  But that’s obviously not an empirical assertion.  Anyways, read the article here:

American Catholics are more liberal than the general population on social issues like divorce and homosexuality, despite the Catholic Church’s longstanding conservatism on both issues, according to a new survey.

Catholics are more likely than non-Catholics to say that homosexual relations, divorce, and heterosexual sex outside wedlock are morally acceptable, according to an analysis by Gallup pollsters released on Monday (March 30).