January 2004 – Page 6 – Catholic Light

Ever heard of this?

One of the things that has been occupying my time lately is a travelling program we’re having at my school in March. It’s called Challenge Day. It’s quite expensive (of course), and it’s being touted as the best thing to have ever come down the pike. The video introduction to the program called to my mind tent revivals in the South, complete with tears, hands in the air, and other signs of emotional breakdown.

It seems to me that those children would have been better off going to confession.

I don’t know how many readers we have who are in the education business, but I’d appreciate hearing the reaction of somebody who has witnessed this program first-hand before I start recommending students to stay home that day.

Pregnant minors, lies, and Hodean

I haven’t seen too much about Hodean’s abortion views. I assumed he was as pro-abortion as the rest of the Democrat candidates — which is to say, he is in favor of any abortion at any time for any pregnant female, no matter how young or vulnerable she is. That assumption was correct.
Now it turns out that he is a liar about abortion, too. In a speech, he claimed he saw a 12-year-old female patient who was pregnant with her own father’s child. He left out the part that someone else was convicted for getting her pregnant. The invaluable Tim Russert confronted Hodean about leaving out that inconvenient fact. (By the way, conservatives should thank God that someone as intellectually honest as Russert is NBC’s main political analyst. He’s a liberal Democrat, but he asks tough questions of everyone he interviews.)
Not that anyone should be surprised by this revelation — after all, if you believe in unrestricted abortion on demand, you have to believe in all kinds of untruths: that the state has no business intervening to protect a helpless child, that an 8-month-old fetus doesn’t experience pain and isn’t really alive, that most abortions are performed by the free choice of the mother and not out of male coersion or sheer terror…et cetera, et cetera.
I have a lot of empathy for a scared girl who is pregnant long before she can handle it. I have not even the feeblest amount of compassion for politicians who think it’s all right to get rid of her child and call it a good social policy.

Are Vatican translators abandoning the generic use of the word “man”?

The language manipulators are there, even at the Vatican:
A phrase in section 3 of the new apostolic letter on the liturgy says:
in French: la communauté des hommes,
in Italian: la comunità degli uomini,
in Portuguese: a comunidade dos homens,
in Spanish: la comunidad de los hombres,
in English: the whole community of men and women
Cardinal Arinze, would you kindly call your office?

All the Web is a stage

Open Source Shakespeare, my master’s thesis project, now has all of Shakespeare’s plays in it. Check all of them out here.
The next stage will be to make the search tools better, as well as indexing the complete works word-by-word, instead of line-by-line. However, it should be useful right now as it is. Enjoy!

Primal Dean

I read the wheels came off Howard Dean on Monday night.
Everyone was talking about his speech, “We’re going to New Hampshire! And Nebraska! And Boise! And Constantinople!!! And Paris on a yellow submarine!!!! YEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH!” Or something like that.
In any case, reading about the primal scream made me think he let out a howl like Schwarzenneger would have in any one of his movies except Kindergarten Cop. Come to think of it he probably screamed at the kids once or twice.
Anyway – I watched the video on the Foxnews.com site and came away thinking, “That’s it?” Dean was doing his best demogoguery, which turned out to make him look like a mental patient. It wasn’t an action-film scream. It was just silly.
But he was getting egged on by a crowd of Deanies. Perhaps mental patients travel in packs.