What with four hurricanes pummeling Florida, Iran going nuclear, Iraq going nuts, an earthquake in California, and Mount St. Helens getting indigestion the end must be near. Oh, and I forgot to mention George Soros. He's a sign the end is near as well. I went to confession today and purchased seven years worth of canned goods at Costco. Got my absentee ballot application, too. For 2008. Hillary and Obama against whom?
Controversies: September 2004 Archives
That we’ve misunderstood the beheadings. Some snippets:
This is not about us — it is about them. The beheading films are recruitment tools. They've been around for a long time, part and parcel of the first generation of "jihad" home movies, circulated mostly in North Africa to excite homicidal fanatics and lure them into the Islamist bands. The main difference between then and now is that their marketing and distribution have improved, thanks to their comrades at al Jazeera and al Arabiya, and the Internet.
...
We cannot wage an effective war unless we understand the nature of our enemy. If we do not grasp that the terrorists' ranks are full of people who are there precisely because they are thrilled by the prospect of beheading human beings, we will fail to see the war through to its necessary conclusion. The beheadings are about them, not us. They show us very important things we need to know: What they are, what they want, what they will do if we do not stop them.
Read the whole thing!
Green vs. black by Thomas Sowell in the washington times today. This will make your head spin.
Among the many luxuries wealth can buy is insulation from reality -- the most dangerous luxury of all. Another dangerous luxury is a sense of being one of the wonderfully special people with superior wisdom and virtue. Environmental extremism flourishes among those who can afford both luxuries.Did you know people in the wealthy San Francisco suburb of Sausalito, across the bay, own 80,000 acres of land in Kenya? What are they doing with it? They are setting it aside as a nature preserve,to keep poor people in Kenya from hunting animals for food on those 80,000 acres.
And, I might add, not a moment too soon. I doubt all the contemplatives on the planet couldn't hold back God's wrath with their prayer and mortifications if this were broadcast.
"Popetown," featuring the voices of comedienne Ruby Wax as the pontiff and model Jerry Hall as a fame-hungry nun, was commissioned for the digital channel BBC3. The animation featured corrupt cardinals and an infantile pope who bounced around the Vatican on a pogo stick.Try blasphemous and sacrilegious, not "scurriously funny." What the hell is "creative risk" anyway? Why don't they admit they just want to sell ads and be done with it.BBC chiefs said Thursday it was too offensive to broadcast.
"After a lot of consideration and consultation, balancing the creative risk with the potential offense to some parts of the audience, we have decided not to transmit the program," said BBC3 Controller Stuart Murphy.
"Despite all the creative energy that has gone into this project and the best efforts of everyone involved, the comic impact of the delivered series does not outweigh the potential offense it will cause," he added. "There is a fine judgment line in comedy between the scurrilously funny and the offensive."
Does the EU think adultery is some kind of human right?
At issue is Bishop Loverde's mandate that all priests, seminarians, nuns, church employees and lay volunteers who work with children be fingerprinted for a criminal background check per the Dallas Charter. If undocumented, meaning illegal, aliens are forced to be fingerprinted, is this going to "dry up" Hispanic volunteer participation? I suppose we'll see. I think the article is a fair treament of the issue by the Wash Times.
Some priests are objecting to the Bishop's mandate. Others, it seems, are waiting to draw a line in sand.
The fingerprinting doesn't trouble Leah Tenorio, director of Hispanic ministry at Good Shepherd Catholic Church in Alexandria, as much as the requirement for Social Security numbers. She estimated that 40 percent of the Hispanics whom she ministers lack Social Security cards.Ms. Tenorio should take the Bishop at his word. According the Bishop's mandate, the answer is no, they can't minister unless they've had a background check. Bishop Loverde clearly wants to follow the Dallas Charter to the letter. Let's see what happens if parishes like Good Shepherd don't comply with this mandate. If they are not forced to comply with the mandate and fingerprint all volunteers it could create a tremendous amount of liability for the Diocese if, God forbid, any future case of sexual abuse came to light.
"If you can't complete a background check, what do you do? Does it mean they can't minister?" she said.
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.
My response:
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.
...expectations.
