Woah.  I mean, just, um…woah.  The apparent popularity of this game is incredibly depressing.

I’m really proud of First Things.  This is the second article I’ve read from them in which they don’t change their mind on conservative viewpoints, but take a nuanced approach that recognizes the validity of some of the left’s criticism even while holding to their original positions.  This is wise and helpful:

Without Christ this is a world in which the strong will abuse the weak, the rich ignore or exploit the poor, and those with authority seek advantages for themselves as they exercise their power. We know these things both from the Scriptures and from examining our own hearts.

If our cultural critique is to have integrity, we must simultaneously respect the market and call the corporate sector to righteousness in its business dealings. As uncomfortable as Mike Huckabee’s concerns with executive compensation made many Republicans, his words suggested a healthy willingness critically to examine corporate behavior. If we question corporations when they produce bad products like pornography and gambling operations, then we necessarily accept the notion that the logic of free markets does not insulate them from critique when they commit other types of wrongs.

Francis Schaeffer (still a model for some Protestants) is generally remembered as an advocate for the Christian worldview. What has often been forgotten are his strong words about American materialism. Schaeffer lauded the hippies for their diagnosis of the ills of our society. Americans, he charged, are addicted to personal peace and affluence.

For a long time my natural instinct, the one that kept me deaf to the complaints of those claiming to have been treated unjustly, has been to defend the corporate estate against all criticisms. We must not be so passive even toward a system that has provided so well for most of us. Is the answer more government? No. The answer is to consistently call for righteousness.

It’s an article about an intense Catholic judge who might get in trouble for her tough stance on executions.

Judge Keller, 55, has always kept her own counsel; her colleagues at the court have given her the nickname Mother Superior because of her reserved and diligent demeanor and her devout Roman Catholic faith.

Nonetheless, my brothers Ben and Kevin, both students at Fordham University, are getting a free U2 concert tomorrow.  I love them.  Yet I loathe them.  It’s tricky, family.  More here from rock-god and theologian, Tommy B:

For those who have not yet heard, the long-lived ensemble of rock royalty known as U2 are coming to Fordham’s Rose Hill campus this Friday, for an early-morning concert to be featured on the television show “Good Morning America.”

Governor O’Malley, long considered the main influence for the character of Mayor (then Gov.) Tommy Carcetti in the Wire, is still trying to abolish the Death Penalty, though he’s moving slow.  See?  That’s Catholic Social Teaching too, you know.  More here, via Pew:

O’Malley, a longtime capital punishment opponent, has declined to issue regulations since then, saying the legislature deserved a chance to permanently repeal the death penalty. Such bills have been considered during each of the past three years.

So I’m pretty excited about this movie. I have a bit of a problem with this essay, which basically argues that Watchmen failed in its project to get ride of superheroes. Fine, maybe it did, if that was its project. I certainly agree that superheroes create moral complications that remain unexamined in the vast majority of comics, and that the superficiality of grit and gore has come to function for what ought to be psychological depth–despite the fact that the Watchmen comic had both. Yes. That’s true. But analysis like this misses the point that people really, really like superheroes–we always have!–and to say that superheroes are ultimately destructive is not to say that they’re not interesting or fun to talk about or beautiful. Go back to Achilles–that dude almost lost the war for the Trojans, but he made for a good story.

This is a fascinating article.  The trick about pain is that, once you get to know someone’s story, it’s hard not to at least understand why and how they hurt.  Of course, you think, this person should not have done what they did, should not have been where she was or, got the job he got, or whatever.  But who hasn’t made a bad choice, or, more likely, inherited someone else’s bad choice, a choice that might not even have seemed so wrong at the time?  And once that bad choice is  made, what if all the subsequent good choices are good?  It obviously doesn’t justify something as devastating as colonialism, but, as the child of many non-native Americans, I would be hypocritical if I didn’t say that I’m sympathetic to problem of children of colonizers, even if I’m intellectually and morally much more attached to those who have been colonized.  I don’t think there’s an easy solution to this, and I think living with that ambiguity might be the most painful part of that legacy.  More here:

Even 46 years later, for the French the Algerian legacy is roughly akin to what the Civil War is for Spaniards. Everything to do with France’s colonial reign remains a flashpoint and open wound, above all the long and brutal war that ended it, but not least the legacy of the pieds noirs as occupiers or victims, depending on one’s perspective. Though often reluctantly, France is now confronting a history that it has frequently seemed as anxious to forget as, for many years, it was to forget the Vichy era.

So yes, I know the song can be a bit cheesy and the Fray are now a bit too popular for anyone with any sort of indy cred to like.  But I really like this song, just as I like any song with a deep sense of religious yearning.  The song is about being really angry at God, about feeling disappointed that the world is the way it is and that God seems not to be there.  I can totally identify with this.  This is why I love the novels of Salman Rushdie and the movies of Ingmar Bergman, or that other popular God song–Joan Osborne’s One of Us. These songs, and these books, and these movies, even if they are ostensibly about doubt, are really about faith, or at least the deep yearning for faith, the painful desire to believe and to know fully that you believe.  “I believe, help my unbelief” is just about the best description of my faith that I can think of, and songs like these are powerful encouragements for me.

Watchmen is coming out soon, and Alan Moore wants nothing to do with the movie, which is fair enough (though I’m still cautiously optimistic about it).  There’s no denying Moore’s talent and his astounding assertion that comics, graphic novels, what-have-you, are capable of the same emotional depth and ambiguity as their less colorful counterparts.  Here’s a good sample point from a fine interview:

You made the villain such a pitiful figure. In the comics for years, he was a psychotic maniac who kills indiscriminately, just does terrible, terrible things, and you made him so pitiful and sad.

I suppose that’s what I was saying. Well, psychotic murders — the key word there is “psychotic,” which is, as far as I know, an illness. This is not to say that people shouldn’t be entitled to feel rage or the lust for revenge when something happens to them at the hands of somebody like this, but you’ve got to remember at the end of the day it’s not strictly speaking that person’s fault. That something has happened to them, they have made some bad decision in their life, and while all of us are responsible for our actions, sometimes people get broken and it is increasingly difficult for them to know their own actions. So I suppose that if there was anything actually being said in “The Killing Joke,” it was that everybody has probably got a reason for being where they are, even the most monstrous of us.

Um.  I would say probably neither actually, although it’s a heck of a headline, ay?  Anyways, there’s a whole lot of controversy about Sebelius, a Catholic who’s pro-choice but against abortion personally, which seems generally to be the Catholic Democrat line.  At any rate, there are a few posts in the US News and World Report religion blog about the fight her nomination has occasioned about who’s truly Catholic and the moral positioning of pro-life strategy.  These are pretty old debates, but they’re still interesting in that there is an increasingly hardening stance among Catholics who simply will not bend on abortion, and I think it’s important to recognize these people often might be sympathetic to Democratic policies save this issue.    It’s increasingly complicated though.  Needless to say, the Catholic right is not thrilled and they’re also not happy  that pro-life Senator Brownback has given Sebelius his support.  Meanwhile,  the Catholic left is a bit more supportive.

The right-wing position is clearly encapsulated by Weigel (this is the article linked to above):

This attempt to spin and redefine the pro-life position, such that one can claim to be a pro-life Catholic while supporting candidates or nominees who have taken extreme pro-abortion positions, must be publicly repudiated by the appropriate Catholic authorities at Gov. Sebelius’ hearings so that, no matter what the fate of her nomination, a clear, bright, and unmistakable line is drawn.