Month: September 2007

Tom Browne’s nuggets

Sir Thomas Browne offered advice for the thinking Christian believer in his Religio Medici (1642), along the way dropping memorable observations:

* The wisedom [sic] of God receives small honour from those vulgar heads that rudely stare about, and with a grosse simplicity admire his workes; those highly magnify him whose judicious enquiry into his acts, and deliberate research of his creatures, returne the duty of a devout and learned admiration. (Part I, Section 13)

I like that “devout and learned admiration.”  He is describing a 1950s Jesuit approach to learning and religion and I suppose one of 2000s too.

Speaking of us, our persons:

[We] are that bold and adventurous piece of nature, which he that studies wisely learnes in a compendium what others labour at in a divided piece and endlesse volume.  (I,16)

It’s the “bold and adventurous piece of nature” I have in mind here.

He looks to nature, “that bold and publik Manuscript, that lies expans’d unto the eyes of all . . . the Scripture and Theology of the Heathens,” who have no written Scripture to learn from.  Foolish we are, he says, to “disdain to suck Divinity from the flowers of nature.”  Sounds like Wordsworth here.

As to the works of nature, “God is like a skilful Geometrician” who devises “according to the constituted and forelaid principles of his art.”  He has in mind God the Artist, operating not in a capricious manner.

So to give all credit to Nature as if it were acting alone is to do it for a hammer or pen for a building or poem.  It is to “let our Hammers rise up and boast they have built our houses, and our pens receive the honors of our writings.” 

And so it is that “Nature is the art of God.”

Not bad stuff, I say, bespeaking a simple faith which many in our churches embrace.  And many’s the preacher who could quote this fellow.

 

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McGuire, collared, still wears the collar

More bad news about Rev. Donald McGuire, the Jesuit, with the provincial, Ed Schmidt, sounding without a clue in this Sun-Times piece by its alert religion writer:

He’s been convicted twice, jailed twice — but his order lets him wear the collar, won’t say if he’ll be kicked out

Moreover, mum’s the word on whether the province has gone to Rome about him to get him literally defrocked.

Big image problem here in his nephew going after him as lawyer for the latest accuser. 

“It’s time we took [the collar] away,” said Kevin McGuire, the priest’s nephew and a lawyer for “John Doe 116,” who’s suing the priest and the Jesuits.


Schmidt, however,

“can’t find anything in the Jesuits’ rules” permitting him to ask Donald McGuire to stop dressing as a priest.


A helpless giant, apparently.

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Scrambling for the mantle

Defending a proposed Aurora, IL, “woman’s health center” yesterday, pro-choice clerics said they mean to reclaim the moral mantle from pro-lifers.

Rev. Larry Greenfield, exec minister of Metro Chi’s American Baptist Churches, said to deny access to abortion is to deny “moral standing” to people who want one and those who approve that. 

He spoke in a press conference at Chicago Temple (1st United Methodist Church), across Washington from the Daley Center.  American Baptists are known by some as Northern Baptists, i.e., not Southern.

The health center in question is what many would call an abortion mill, which is by definition bad for the health unborn child and arguably also for that of the mother.  Hence the quote marks. 

Choice is a matter of social justice, said Mr. Greenfield and eight other ministers.  He criticized members of “the religious right,” who claim to hear “the voice of God” and “try to impose their hearing of it on the rest of us by law.”

He added, “To deny somebody choice is contrary to what I believe to be the teachings of Jesus . . .”

However, Mr. Greenfield did not address the objection (not put to him but lurking in the minds of some) whether courts have imposed by law on Illinois voters a denial of choice whether to permit abortions. 

Nor was he asked to define social justice, a seemingly all-purpose category which F.A. Hayek attempted to expose as meaningless.  Newspaper and blog readers may decide if he succeeded by reading his Law, Legislation and Liberty, vol. 2, The Mirage of Social Justice.

Or go to the Winter 1997 issue of Critical Review, which offers pro and con on his thinking.

Or a sock-‘em-bust-‘em Front Page defense of his social justice critique, see FP for 2/27/04.

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Progress and its discontents

Yearning for the good old days, Thomas Love Peacock’s Mr. Escot, “always looking into the dark side of the question,” finds in material progress “only so many links in the great chain of corruption” and in its attendant multiplication of wants and desires only what leads to decline from “the primitive dignity of [man’s] sylvan [woodsy] origin.” 

It’s in Peacock’s funny, funny 1816 novel, Headlong Hall. 

At breakfast in a roadside inn, Escot rails against the beef on the table: “The natural and original man lived in the woods: the roots and fruits of the earth supplied his simple nutriment: he had few desires and no diseases.”  Once hunting of “the goat and the deer” became the norm, however, and fire was invented [sic] to cook them, “luxury, disease, and premature death were let loose on the world.”

Egad, the man was a vegetarian, which is to be classified for rhyming if nothing else with Lerner and Loew’s Eliza Doolittle’s discovered dancing with a Hungarian.

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Progress and its discontents, etc.

* Yearning for the good old days, Thomas Love Peacock’s Mr. Escot, “always looking into the dark side of the question,” finds in early-19th-century material progress “only so many links in the great chain of corruption” and in its attendant multiplication of wants and desires only what leads to decline from “the primitive dignity of [man’s] sylvan origin.” 

Sylvan as in Pennsylvania, William Penn’s woods or woodsy land — silva means forest in our mother tongue of Latin.  It’s in Peacock’s funny, funny 1816 novel, Headlong Hall. 

At breakfast in a roadside inn, Escot rails against the beef on the table: “The natural and original man lived in the woods: the roots and fruits of the earth supplied his simple nutriment: he had few desires and no diseases.”  Once hunting of “the goat and the deer” became the norm, however, and fire was invented [sic] to cook them, “luxury, disease, and premature death were let loose on the world.”

Egad, the man was a vegetarian, which is to be classified for rhyming if nothing else with Lerner and Loew’s Eliza Doolittle’s discovered dancing with a Hungarian.

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New York leads way

My, how they talk in New York, and this is not Murdoch’s Post:

The politics of Iraq, tilting strongly against the war for two years, will likely move back toward the center now, thanks to the impressive testimony of our top commander and to the outrageous attacks on him by some Democrats and their party’s wackadoo wing.

Can we imagine anything this pointed, this clear, this non-Dem-party commentary at Chi Trib and Sun-Times?

Yes, at Chi Trib, which has catholic taste for its op-ed page.  But not at S-T, where some mythical left-wing blue-collar audience waits eagerly for editorials that call for boycotting BP, etc.

The web head, “Petraeus brings the facts, but some Dems can’t handle the truth,” is apt. 

Trib libs have day, Sun-Times catches up

Neither of Chicago’s biggest papers show much interest in what Gen. Petraeus said in the last two days.  Their interest lies in Dems’ responses — it’s their party, is it not? — and Moveon-dot-org talking points.  Tom Frisbie, more leftist than I’d realized, has a cartoon for S-T likening Petraeus to Gen. Westmoreland in the Viet Nam war.  He really believes that stuff, apparently.  Tsk, tsk.

Chi Trib yesterday in hard copy — and it’s hard copy we are talking about here, not web sites — featured the general and the ambassador, Ryan Crocker, about equally.  It reminded me of the old joke about the diocesan newspaper headline, “Tornado in Oklahoma: No Catholics Killed.”

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Random nuggets . . .

In his review of S.A. Venkatesh’s Off the Books: The Underground Economy of the Urban Poor (Harvard) in the 6/22/07 Times Lit Supplement, Paul Seabright, U. of Toulouse econ prof and author of The Company of Strangers: A natural history of economic life, 2004, accepts V’s assessment of rampant intelligence among S. Side Chi residents (dubious tho it may be) but notes the non-transferability of the skills by which they survive.

Much of their capital turns out to be highly personalized, dependent on their network of contacts and loyalties, on favours given and returned, and to have little or no value to anyone who tries to set up in a different city or even a different neighbourhood.  People are risk-averse, and the neighbourhood is an informal insurance system, so it takes an unusual degree of self- assurance to take the gamble of leaving.

He asks what would help, for instance, more or less regulation of “labor markets.”

After all, regular jobs at the minimum wage are a luxury here, so does this make the minimum wage an irrelevance, or is it a part of the problem?

I have my strongly held opinion in this matter, having embraced the teaching of F.A. Hayek in these matters.  Even without it, however, Wal-Mart wages seem irrelevant in this situation, as opposed to legislated ones.  The starving man is glad for bread, and telling him to eat cake for the sake of union power is not a good idea.

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Coming up on the St. Sabina RC parish calendar is Bible class by televangelist Tommy Tenney, of Godchasers Network, tonight at 7.  Tenney is a white guy out of Pinevilla, LA.  It is not surprising that he’s not RC, which I presume he is not, because with all its protesting and marching and hosting Dem pols and other demagogs in the pulpit, St. Sabina is a Bible church.

That is, most of its members are black church-goers, which means mostly evangelical-oriented.  When the irrepressible, undigestable Al Sharpton mounted the pulpit a few years back for a largely political harangue, the packed church included people who consulted their Bibles, not their missals, during the service.  Pfleger is successful because he plays not only to black social concerns but also to their Bible orientation.

In this he isn’t out of sync with Things Catholic, where The Word has come to equal if not supersede The Sacrifice in importance.  He just goes at it more vigorously.  I’m sure this Tenney fellow is a boffo performer.  And I’d like to say the same for more Catholic preachers and teachers.

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“Thank you, Christopher,” Hugh McDiarmid’s wife wrote him, using his real name, after he’d written a glowing poem about her, he having been a very difficult husband for many years.  “Always remember . . . I love you and only you.”  But she added, pointedly and poignantly, “ . . . and could have been so very much more if you’d only let me.”

This from her letters to him, edited by Beth Junor, in a TLS review 8/10/07.

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In his review of DESIRING ROME. Male subjectivity and reading Ovid’s “Fasti” (Ohio State) in TLS 6/8/07, T.P. Wiseman skewers author Richard J. King for characterizing Ovid as “submissive, feminized and, of course, symbolically castrated” (Wiseman’s words).

“If psychoanalysis has a value,” Wiseman writes of such a treatment, “it is surely therapeutic. There seems little point in attempting it on a man who has been dead for nearly two millennia.”

I’d say so.

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And finally, world population growth since the 1950s has been not from people “breeding like rabbits” but from their no longer “dying like flies,” says an unnamed UN advisor quoted by Bjorn Lomborg in his Skeptical Environmentalist.  You can remember something like that.  All things being equal, a simile works better than a metaphor.

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