The Alexandria Day School, where tuition is about $15,000 a year, accidently served margaritas to its students at lunch. The school had to issue an apology to parents.
I don't see what the big deal is -- if you're charging fifteen grand to teach multiplication tables to 8-year-olds, I think the kids should drink for free.
Rod Dreher, reporter for the Dallas Morning News, and a frequenter of many Catholic blogs, says the bishops and the Pope himself are a bunch of liars in a comment on Bettnet:
...the Pope’s asking for Krenn’s resignation “for reasons of health” is also a form of lying. They lie to maintain the great facade. They lie by habit. They lie “for the good of the Church.” They lie. I don’t believe a thing they say anymore, about anything. If the Pope said tomorrow that the sun rises in the east and sets in the west, I’d double-check that too, or at least wonder what kind of angle he was pushing.
Rod, you called the Holy Father a liar. I do not think he is a liar, unless you can prove that he deliberately stated something that he knew was untrue.
Nor do I think defending him from the charge of lying is "idolatry." Contra Joseph [in another comment], I'm not offering a "reflexive defense," nor do I go looking for opportunities to play Defender of the Pope. (I find most discussions of The Scandal to be almost completely unedifying.)
Listen to what you wrote: "If the Pope said tomorrow that the sun rises in the east and sets in the west, I’d double-check that too, or at least wonder what kind of angle he was pushing." That is breathtakingly cynical, and cynicism, as Chesterton said, is mere intellectual laziness: not everyone is corrupt, and not everone has an "angle" to push.
You are drifting off into the darkness, my brother in Christ, and I beg you to abandon your despair and trust more fully in the Holy Spirit, who will renew and refresh the Chuch whose life he sustains.
UPDATE: Dreher has retracted his "liar" claim, which is admirable, although he seems to maintain that certain bishops do lie, or at least do not tell the entire truth.
My friend Jonah Goldberg of National Review has been "outed" as one of the neoconservative puppetmasters of the Bush Administration. According to a review of Pat Buchanan's new book "Israel's Amen Corner: How the Zionists Betray the American People and the Will of God," Goldberg is on Buchanan's enemies list:
His enemies list of neoconservatives has unsurprising names: Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Irving and William Kristol, Charles Krauthammer and Jonah Goldberg.Hmm...what do those men have in common? Are they all from New York? Are they all left-handed? No, that's not it. Hmm...
When I was a lad, I loved reading Buchanan's columns for their pungent prose and full-strength opinions. Now, I wish this obnoxious windbag would leave the stage for good, taking his "the 1950s were the Golden Age of America and Catholicism" shtick with him. He's an embarrassment to Catholics, Christians in general, and political conservatives.
(Before you ask: do I think Buchanan is an anti-Semite? No, I've not seen any evidence of that. Do I think he loves to play "bait the Jew"? Oh, yes.)
Jimmy Carter, the most ex of our ex-presidents, doesn't like Senator Zell Miller (D-Olympus) anymore. In his speech to the Republican convention, Miller ripped Carter for being a "pacifist," and so Carter zings Miller for being "disloyal."
As the AP article notes, Miller placed loyalty to his family (and to his country, it's fair to imply) over party membership. Carter's santimonious words remind us that old age doesn't necessarily bring wisdom:
By now, there are many of us loyal Democrats who feel uncomfortable in seeing that you have chosen the rich over the poor, unilateral pre-emptive war over a strong nation united with others for peace, lies and obfuscation over the truth and the political technique of character assassination as a way to win elections or to garner a few moments of applause.
"The rich over the poor." Bleech. Doesn't he know how many homes John Kerry owns? (All right -- how many homes his wife owns.)
Miller, a brother leatherneck, proved an old saying: you can only push a Marine so far, and then he'll start to push back. Hard.
Hindu militants who burn down churches and mosques, Muslims who kill Hindus and Christians in the name of Allah, Evangelicals asking "Are you saved?" to bus passengers &mdash all pretty much the same thing. Or so Algore tells us.
Gore’s mouth tightened. A Southern Baptist, he, too, had declared himself born again, but he clearly had disdain for Bush’s public kind of faith. “It’s a particular kind of religiosity,” he said. "It’s the American version of the same fundamentalist impulse that we see in Saudi Arabia, in Kashmir, in religions around the world: Hindu, Jewish, Christian, Muslim. They all have certain features in common. In a world of disconcerting change, when large and complex forces threaten familiar and comfortable guideposts, the natural impulse is to grab hold of the tree trunk that seems to have the deepest roots and hold on for dear life and never question the possibility that it’s not going to be the source of your salvation. And the deepest roots are in philosophical and religious traditions that go way back. You don’t hear very much from them about the Sermon on the Mount, you don’t hear very much about the teachings of Jesus on giving to the poor, or the beatitudes. It’s the vengeance, the brimstone."By the "tree trunk," Gore (probably inadvertently) brings up an allusion to the lignum vitae, the cross on which Jesus hung. Is that really a bad thing to hang onto, whether we're in a time of "change" or stasis?
Gore seems to be attacking religion as an independent standard for measuring whether or not a "change" is desirable. He doesn't bother to refute this idea: he just condescendingly implies that Evangelicals such as President Bush are scaredy-cats who need their faith-blankies to make it through this life. Not like strong, virile Alpha Male Algore, who is unafraid of change. (Except climate change. That scares the crap out of him.)
Were we saved through the Sermon on the Mount? Nope. The Beatitudes, which Gore apparently thinks is separate from the Sermon on the Mount? Again, no. Are we saved by giving to the poor? Well, in a way: if we unite our wills to God's, and perform works of mercy, that's part of how we "work out our salvation," as the Bible says.
Salvation begins, is sustained, and ends in the person of Jesus Christ, crucified for our sins on the "tree" which Evangelicals, like other Christians, hold onto for dear life. Algore was a divinity student for a while -- maybe he skipped class the day they covered this topic. And why is he saying such nasty things about tree-hugging, anyway?
Whatever other -isms they believe, most professors believe in postmodernism. My definition of that term is: "The belief that there is no absolute Truth, there are only 'truths' that are constructed in our minds. Dialogue is, therefore, not a tool that can be used to discover Truth, but merely a word-game that people use to construct 'reality' in their minds."
That isn't an exhaustive definition of postmodernism, but I think that's a fair summary. Where does this idea come from? I'm sure Beregond can give us its supple, nuanced intellectual history, beginning with Decartes' revolutionary idea that knowledge begins with one's intellect and not the senses, and extending through his (Beregond's) bete noir, Immanuel Kant.
However, I am not an intellectual, and although I do not doubt the role of ideas in the formation of the postmodern critique (for it is surely not a philosophy), often I look to more concrete things when I ask why someone thinks a particular way. I submit that one of the reasons is the university library.
Not just the library, to be sure -- there is also the Registrar's office, the deans, the Faculty Senate, and all the other little rule-making and -enforcing entities on campus. But the library is the entity I am mad at tonight, so the library will be my example.
You may know, if you've read Catholic Light before, that I'm finishing my M.A. thesis project (Open Source Shakespeare). To accompany the site, I am writing a substantial paper, and so I have checked out books from the library. Tonight, I realized that 13 of them are overdue, and I owe the library $32.50.
I figured I'd pay the fine and renew the books. Not so fast! the library Web site said. There is a hold on my library privileges. I called the library, where a recording told me that I would have to bring in the books before I could renew or check out books.
"That's got to be a mistake," I thought. "I'm done with classes, and I'm rarely on campus. Surely they aren't going to make me physically go to the circulation desk."
I called the circulation desk. A nice young lady confirmed that yes, indeed, I would have to drag 13 books halfway across the county in order to get my records cleaned up.
"Is this some kind of collegiate hazing?" I asked. She didn't get the joke. "Let me get this straight: if I come in, I can renew the books, right?"
"Yes, absolutely. Come to the desk, and we'll check them in, and check them back out to you," she explained.
"And why can't we do that over the phone?"
"They have to be checked back in, because they're late."
"I know they're late, and I'll pay the fine. I have no problem with that. But I'd rather not have to make a 40-mile round trip just to renew some books."
"Hold on for a moment, please." Sound of a brief, muffled conversation. "Yeah, my supervisor says you have to come in person. Otherwise, we'd have to do an override."
I thanked her and hung up, without asking the obvious question: what's bad about giving me an "override"? Would it disturb the balance of the universe if they simply said, "Yes, Eric, you can keep the books you need. Don't worry about using your vacation time at work, or leaving your family for most of an evening. We'll renew the books and you can pay the fine the next time you're on campus"?
Nobody else has requested any of the overdue books. I'll pay the fine, or else they won't give me a diploma. Either this is a petty punishment for forgetting the due date, or it's a dumb rule that nobody has thought about but must be followed unquestioningly.
Library book regulations are a small thing, to be sure. But they are part of the web of intricate, arbitrary rules that make up the modern university. Other American institutions (except governments) actively try to make things easier on the people they serve. Not universities, which are run like medieval fiefdoms, complete with their own legal systems.
It's unsurprising that academic professionals — who know no other life, having spent their adult years in this milieu — would think that Truth is a construct and words are weapons used to advance one's personal will. That is precisely what their workplace teaches them.
Ralph Peters, unlike secular liberals, is angry about the mass murder in southern Russia and wants to fight the murderers:
"If Muslim religious leaders around the world will not publicly condemn the taking of children as hostages and their subsequent slaughter — if those "men of faith" will not issue a condemnation without reservations or caveats — then no one need pretend any longer that all religions are equally sound and moral....""Negotiations are the heroin of Westerners addicted to self-delusion...."
"A final thought: Did any of those protesters who came to Manhattan to denounce our liberation of 50 million Muslims stay an extra day to protest the massacre in Russia? Of course not.
"The protesters no more care for dead Russian children than they care for dead Kurds or for the hundreds of thousands of Arabs that Saddam Hussein executed. Or for the ongoing Arab-Muslim slaughter of blacks in Sudan. Nothing's a crime to those protesters unless the deed was committed by America."
Amen, brother. As President Bush astutely saw very soon after the September 11 attacks, the world is dividing itself between those who want to fight international Islamic terrorism, and those who support it or appease it. For all countries, the options are either Austria (let yourself be co-opted by it) Switzerland (pretend to be neutral, but bankroll the murderers), or Britain (fight until victory, or the last Briton is choking on his own blood, as Churchill put it.)
So this slaughter of the innocents was just like the Columbine massacre, times ten. What do you want to bet that liberals won't get as angry at Islamist terrorists as they did at American gun owners? Will Michael Moore's new movie be "Bowling for Chechnya," blaming the whole thing on radical Islam's penchant for indiscriminate violence?
Nah. Because as I've said many times in this space, to liberals, Islamist terrorism is just a force of nature, and you cannot ascribe any blame to the perpetrators: because they're essentially sub-human, and we shouldn't have provoked them in the first place.
