Well I’m grateful he’s acknoweldged his mistake.  I do like this Pope a lot, and he’s right that internal squabbles are going to destroy us if we don’t operate out of love.

In the letter addressed to the world’s bishops, which the Vatican will release on Thursday, the pope also says he was pained by Catholics’ criticism of him and that the Vatican could have foreseen problems if it had used the Internet more.

It is extremely rare in Church history for a pope to have to explain his actions to his bishops after the fact and to acknowledge that things went wrong.

“The letter is very personal, very anguished, very pained but very honest,” said an Italian bishop who received it and discussed it on the condition that he remain anonymous.

The pope says the affair unleashed a storm of “vehemence” and hurt him deeply, particularly because much of the criticism came from Catholics.

I mean, actually, I’m pretty supportive of this movement.  But I’m pretty sure strongarming through the government is not the way to go at all.

Motivated by declining membership, the priest sexual-abuse scandals, parish closings and two cases of financial impropriety at churches in Fairfield County, one of those activists, Tom Gallagher of Greenwich, asked lawmakers to intervene.

The bill would have created lay councils of seven to 13 people to oversee the finances of local parishes, relegating Catholic pastors and bishops to an advisory role. It was pulled Tuesday by the co-chairmen of the legislature’s influential judiciary committee amid questions about its constitutionality.

Church leaders bristled at government interference, which they and many legal scholars view as unconstitutional. They also firmly rejected the notion that parishioners have no say in the affairs of their church.

Not that we don’t need scientists too, but they have a specific role that has to be formed by ethics:

“We will develop strict guidelines, which we will rigorously enforce, because we cannot ever tolerate misuse or abuse,” said the President. But, of course, for many Americans, lifting the ban on embryonic stem cell research is already an act of misuse. These are contentless words, and the President must fill in that content. Punting the questions to a group of scientists is not the answer and he is inviting an even deeper level of battle in the culture wars if the NIH comes back with ridiculously broad rules.

This is an important reminder.  I think the hard part about the Holocaust for a lot of people is that the meanings we can use to make it more bearable can, sometimes, make the experience sublime or (tragically)  beautiful and, in some way, less real.  It’s a complicated problem:

Speaking of the Holocaust is never easy-except for those who blithely deny it-but at times Catholics seem to find it easier to speak of the unspeakable in terms that make clear that we, too, know about suffering. We believe we know which words to invoke at the scene of faith-challenging atrocities because feeling forsaken by God is part of the story of our faith as well. The difficult thing to accept, however, is that nothing shows how little we understand the suffering of others more than the attempt to use our story to make sense of it.

It’s likely the Catholic Church will find itself again where it is now-seeming still unable to comprehend the enormity of the Shoah-until it realizes that no matter the religion into which its savior was born, the Holocaust is not part of its narrative of salvation. Even allowing that those who hold a universal faith must seek opportunities for salvation everywhere, it does little good to treat Auschwitz as another stage in an endless Passion Play. To do so subjects brutal realities to the theological imagination, where meaning holds sway over facts.

And this is from someone who is pro-choice:

Think about what’s being dismissed here as “politics” and “ideology.” You don’t have to equate embryos with full-grown human beings—I don’t—to appreciate the danger of exploiting them. Embryos are the beginnings of people. They’re not parts of people. They’re the whole thing, in very early form. Harvesting them, whether for research or medicine, is different from harvesting other kinds of cells. It’s the difference between using an object and using a subject. How long can we grow this subject before dismembering it to get useful cells? How far should we strip-mine humanity in order to save it?

This article present science as though it reveals values, which it does not.  So yes, I have an issue with Bush and co.’s dishonest regarding science as well, but paragraphs like the following show really big problems:

During the Bush years, Congressional Democrats and scientists themselves issued report after report asserting that the White House had distorted or suppressed scientific information: including efforts to strip information about condoms from a government Web site and the editing of air quality reports issued by the Environmental Protection Agency.

The Union of Concerned Scientists, for example, maintains an “A to Z” list on its Web site of “case studies” in what it calls the politicization of science under Mr. Bush, like his decision to devote federal money to programs promoting abstinence education despite studies showing that such programs have limited effectiveness.

Look: I don’t like abstinence-only education either.  But let’s be clear: effectiveness is not the only metric for whether or not something should be done, and while scientific evidence can determine effectiveness, it cannot determine morality.  So if you have significant moral problems with an action, then whether or not its effective, it doesn’t matter.  This means that it was wrong for Bush to lie (if he did) that abstinence-only education was more effective than encouraging birth control; it doesn’t mean, though, that it’s necessarily right or wrong to advocate either.

But it can often look that way.  It is a shame really.  I mean, the deal is this: how do you make art within limitations?  It seems like a really tricky problem, until you realize that all art is produced within limitations: a sonnet, a song, etc, all have to follow a form.  The trick is making that form beautiful.  More here:

With function prized above all else, the Olympic Village building designs have a default “green” look to them: blocky, all glass, covered in matted foliage. It looks as though the developers simply forgot to design the place.

The field of architecture is experiencing a design crisis, with clients ranging from private owners to cities demanding that architects prioritize sustainability above all else — as if design itself were an obnoxious carbon-emitter. This is partly because high designers and the so-called “starchitects,” who fear that new methods and materials might not comport with long-established styles, are not taking the lead on sustainability issues, leaving green innovation to younger firms with fewer resources. Both well-known firms and up-and-comers lack experience in working with new, often expensive green materials, which has forced many designers to depend greatly on singular and design-restrictive tactics such as “passive design” — essentially, lots of space and windows — to achieve sustainability goals.

That’s the argument, anyways.  This article quotes all the majors on this issue, and while there’s nothing really new here, it’s a good round-up of materialist explanations of religious belief: (h/t Arts and Letters)

Based on these and other experiments, Bering considers a belief in some form of life apart from that experienced in the body to be the default setting of the human brain. Education and experience teach us to override it, but it never truly leaves us, he says. From there it is only a short step to conceptualising spirits, dead ancestors and, of course, gods, says Pascal Boyer, a psychologist at Washington University in St Louis, Missouri. Boyer points out that people expect their gods’ minds to work very much like human minds, suggesting they spring from the same brain system that enables us to think about absent or non-existent people.

This is pretty amazing: a bunch of cartoons the NYTimes accepted and then had to pay their creators not to print.

His stuff on embryos is crawling towards a dangerous place:

Those of us who have supported the President, who were non-plussed by the reversal of the Mexico City policy on the grounds that gag rules are difficult to defend in a liberal polity, and have been ambivalent about the nomination of Gov. Kathleen Sebelius, must here draw a line. The President’s decision on stem cells, and the hubristic way it is being defended by his staff, is deeply disturbing. I do not expect to agree with anyone one hundred percent of the time, so I do not feel inclined to abandon my overall support for the administration. But, it is Strike One.