So there’s a review of a new biography in the New York Times, and a review of  the review at Commonweal, which has this fantastic quote from FO’C about the Misfit:

“I don’t want to equate the Misfit with the devil. I prefer to think, however unlikely this may seem, the old lady’s gesture, like the mustard-seed, will grow to be a great crow-filled tree in the Misfit’s heart, and will be enough of a pain to him there to turn him into the prophet he was meant to become. But that’s another story.”

But he is bad at media stuff.  This is old news really–the Pope doesn’t know how to talk to media!  Vatican is too secretive!  Critics learn more than friends!–but it’s still a useful run-down of the Williamson scandal, how the Pope was not nearly as guilty as he appears, and how this whole thing could have been handled much better:

Even among today’s critics who have lashed out at the pope, some remain unaware that Benedict XVI had not known about Williamson’s appalling views, and when he was informed, the pope quickly issued a public statement to disassociate himself from Holocaust deniers. Others do not realize that Benedict XVI had not restored Williamson and the other SSPX bishops to regular status. Those four bishops are still suspended from public ministry; the lifting of their excommunications was only one step in a process of reconciliation. But the media message that carried the day: Williamson, an anti-Semite, was back in business.

Yet the story has even more depth and context that the Vatican failed effectively to correct: Neither Williamson’s original excommunication in 1988 nor the pope’s decision to revoke it were related in any way to his extreme political views. Under the canon law that governs church affairs, excommunication is a rare disciplinary action, used only for certain specific offenses (such as, in this case, ordaining a bishop without approval from the Holy See). The church does not formally excommunicate members for their political views, even when those views are repugnant to Catholic teachings — as, for example, in the case of Catholic politicians who favor unrestricted legal abortion.

Bishop Williamson poses a special case, of course, because a bishop is a public leader, a teacher of the faithful. But again, Williamson is still suspended; he is not functioning as a bishop with the authorization of the church.

All these points of clarification could and should have been made on Jan. 24, along with the original announcement of the pope’s decision to end the excommunications.

Instead, the Vatican let 12 agonizing days pass before the Secretariat of State released an unsigned statement in a tardy effort to clear up misunderstandings. The pope’s move “has not changed the legal situation” of the SSPX bishops, the statement observed; they are still suspended and will remain so until they demonstrate their “total adherence to the doctrine and discipline of the church.” Williamson in particular will be obliged to “absolutely, unambiguously, and publicly distance himself from this position on the Holocaust.”

Unfortunately, the international outcry was already far advanced. The Vatican press office had fallen behind the news cycle, and editorial writers were now responding to each other rather than to the original announcement. Denunciations of the pope — often based on inaccurate reports, and without the context outlined above — continued even after the record had been set straight.

Spend the dang money already!

The most frequent argument for having a big endowment is that it’s supposed to tide schools over tough times. It sure isn’t working out that way. True endowment funds can’t be spent even in an emergency; only the cash income and capital gains from them can be spent. (Does anyone remember what capital gains are these days?) So-called quasi-endowment funds can be drawn down if necessary, but universities seem loath to do so even in the current circumstances, as if preserving capital is a higher priority than preserving academic programs.

Honestly, it’s a horrid procedure, and I don’t know many who would disagree with that on either side.  And making it illegal was the right thing to do, but what’s tricky about it is that, by making this illegal, the pro-life side lost a lot of momentum for their movement, and, what’s more, the banning of partial-birth abortions makes the pro-choice side uneasy, in that its basically at a point of stasis and if it asks for more it’ll be doing something wrong.  Still, the side with more pieces before the stalemate started was certainly pro-choice.  TNR has more:

Now that the ban on partial-birth abortion is the law of the land, the controversy that was most effective in stirring pro-life sentiment has died–to the great relief of pro-choice advocates. But isn’t the ban itself a victory for the pro-life movement? Not really. As staffers inside the National Right to Life Committee would have to concede, the ban does not significantly influence the abortion rate, since it only inhibits a particular procedure. The partial-birth procedure was only invented in the early 1990s; as such, abortion-rights activists have long lived without the procedure. What is more, pro-life groups do not even regard alternatives to partial-birth abortions as more humane, since some involve fetal dismemberment in the womb.

 

Thanks to the successful ban on partial-birth abortion, the pro-life movement has been deprived of one of the few campaigns that moved the national conscience. The potential of giving the movement new life may be a key factor in explaining why Obama and his pro-choices allies have been so slow to make it an issue.

No, not really.  But I am eating meat again, and I accept the fact that eating pork is pretty much like eating  a dog in terms of intelligence and sensitivity of animal being eaten.  This is a tricky situation, in that animals are not people.  They’re really not!  But they also have certain rights that we ought to respect.  Two good books are reviewed here about this, and the reviewer does a good job holding between saying animals are robots and saying animals are humans:

So thoroughly has the idea of animals as unfeeling automatons been discredited that Temple Grandin in Animals Make Us Human and Meg Daley Olmert in Made for Each Other, two books that explore the human-animal bond, dismiss this notion in a few clauses. Though my teachers were wrong about animals having no emotions, both books are reminders that they were right that anthropomorphism can lead to all sorts of problems for human and animal alike.

It’s controversial, but it’s  effective–I mean, if churches compete, the most effective obviously win.  The question, though, is what kind of church then winds up winning?  It’s a bit like diet: if you can buy any food you want, then you might well buy the food that you know is good for you, or you might buy junk food (or more likely, you’ll get something in between).  The problem is that this idea of diet can be changed multiple times a day, while where you go to church is an at least sort of permanent decision.  And so it affects your life in meaningful ways, and, ironically, it is intended to build upon itself.  So you might not like it at first, but eventually you come to really appreciate it.  This actually reveals deeper problems with liberal capitalism: I’m all about churches having a “escape clause”–if you don’t like it, you should be able to leave, but it’s frankly ridiculous to think that churches should be chosen like any other product in the marketplace.  That’s why children ought to be socialized into a church which they can then choose in which to stay or go.  Of course, the problem with all of this is it assumes that human nature is fallen and yet somehow the nature of the churches is not, which, needless to say, has been challenged recently.

Anyways, the article from Slate:

Church shopping, marketing, and the not-so-sanctified practices that go with them make easy targets for criticism. But competition among churches for worshippers has always been fierce in the United States, to the benefit of American religion and individual churchgoers. The prohibition against establishing an official state religion helped give us the shoppers’ paradise that is our religious marketplace. Disestablishment (Massachusetts was the last state to cut ties to its official church, in 1833) meant that preachers had to learn to get along without support from the state. It made the ability to recruit and keep a flock—and get them to give generously—crucial to a church’s survival. In 1992, Roger Finke and Rodney Stark argued in The Churching of America, 1776-1990 that this produced a ministry modeled on capitalism, with pastors acting as the church’s sales force.

Well, of course.  But still, Sontag’s story is interesting.  And I just had a conversation with a good friend of mine who’s also a grad student last night (and a mother) and while she loves being a mom, she’s painfully aware that no matter how supportive her husband is, she’ll do more of the work and time she spends with family is time she is not spending producing great work.  It’s a real tension, and one that men face too, but in much less stark terms.  A review of early Sontag’s journals:

It is in the book’s second half that we begin to see what “ambitious” is code for. We see Sontag, a woman who is interested in her intellectual life above all, become a teenage bride and then a mother at nineteen, only to bail a few short years later. We certainly can’t begrudge her the desire to be free and see the world — that is all any 24-year-old would want. But we do. Her ambitions conflict us; on the same pages where we read of her eminent freedom (as she’s preparing to leave Boston for Oxford) and perhaps feel some empathic relief (she’s been comparing her marriage to a jail for several years) — she’s unsentimental and tearless. Her meals are rendered with more detail than her family. You are sad for Sontag and you are sad for her son and husband — though not in the same way — you want her to pursue her freedom, but you do not want the mother to leave.

This is nothing particularly new: there are a lot more priests in Africa and Asia.  Still, it’s good to know there are a lot more young priests somewhere.

Numbers in Africa had risen by 27.6% and in Asia by 21%, the report said.

The figures were “a continuing trend of moderate growth in the number of priests in the world which began in 2000 after over two decades of disappointing results”, it added

It’s still not back.

The history of musicians dealing with the storm’s aftermath has been a mixed one. In the year after Katrina, benefits around the country helped musicians get home, get instruments, and get back to work. Then again, at Voodoo 2006, Duran Duran’s Simon LeBon fretted from the stage over the devastation he saw on the drive from the airport — a corridor that looked more or less as it had pre-storm — and Wayne Coyne stopped the Flaming Lips’ set to instruct New Orleanians on the importance of helping each other, perhaps mowing each others’ lawns. Then and now, unmown lawns have been the least of the city’s worries.

Yes, yes.  There are good Catholic reasons not to be communist.  Of course.  But you can’t deny that Marx was right about a lot of stuff in this.

The bourgeoisie has, through its exploitation of the world market, given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. To the great chagrin of reactionaries, it has drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood. All old-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all civilized nations, by industries that no longer work up indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe. In place of the old wants, satisfied by the production of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes. In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations. And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature.