Category: Blithe Spirit

Bashing Belleville’s Braxton

This comes as no surprise to those familiar with the arch demeanor and towering self-esteem of Ed Braxton, a theology consultant who served briefly (3 years) as an Oak Park IL pastor before making bishop:

BELLEVILLE, Ill. (AP) – Nearly four dozen priests in Belleville’s diocese want Bishop Edward Braxton to step down.

A letter signed by 45 priests and sent to Braxton says his resignation would be for the good of Braxton and the diocese.

He apologized in January for spending money not his own — restricted Vatican and diocesan funds — for vestments and in general has demonstrated “lack of collaborative and consultative leadership,” say the Four Dozen, who are forwarding their letter to Cardinal George in Chicago and the Vatican’s man in Washington.

They are sure to respond promptly and affirmatively, backing up the priests’ wish for so-called Vatican 2–style governance procedures. 

But first, the Cubs and Sox play a seven-game World Series after Jerry Reinsdorf breaks the bank to buy A-Rod and other stars and Sam Zell gives up on selling Wrigley and changing its name.

Tags: ,

Death sting eliminated

Ezekiel delivers the ultimate promise from God, quoting him:

O my people, I will open your graves
and have you rise from them . . .

Paul tells Romans the same thing:

If the Spirit of the one who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you,
the one who raised Christ from the dead
will give life to your mortal bodies also . . .

This is great news, to say the least.  It solves the ultimate mystery.  These two short (5th Sunday Lent, 3/9/08) passages lead to John’s long account of the raising of Lazarus.

He’s sick and not long for this world, or so people thought.  Jesus decided to use him to make the Ezekiel point about graves opening — and to anticipate the Paul point about resurrection.

The body was in Judea, where they were laying for Jesus.  “You’re sure you want to go back there?” his people asked him.  He answered mysteriously about a twelve-hour day (of daylight, we presume) and stumbling in the dark, meaning let’s go before it’s dark.

There was the back-and-forth with the dead man’s sister, who unwittingly sets him up for his clinching argument, “I am the resurrection and the life; whoever believes in me, even if he dies, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die.”

He immediately puts it to her: “Do you believe this?”  She can’t say yes fast enough.  This was Martha, who got something of a bum rap earlier for getting tied up in housework when something big was happening — the biggest she would ever come up against.  It was a mistake she wasn’t going to make twice.

She sends for Mary, who gets up to go and meet Jesus outside of town.  “The Jews,” present everywhere you turn in these stories, follow her.  She arrives shaking with grief.  He catches his breath at the sight: this Mary broken up, racked with sobbing.  He groans and cries.

“The Jews” see it.  Some of them get nasty about it: “Could not the one who opened the eyes of the blind man have done something so that this man would not have died?”

Jesus goes into action.  Roll the stone away, he says.  The body will smell awfully, says Martha, the practical one.  Didn’t I tell you not to be that way? Jesus says.  The stone is removed, Jesus prays to the Father, he issues the call: “Lazarus, come out!”

He comes out: “Untie him and let him go,” says Jesus, and the rest is history — the gospel truth, we might say. 

As for those “Jews,” they are pretty much understood to be the Jewish authorities.  “Johannine [John] Christians” were Jews in conflict on the basic issue of messianic identity.  This gospel, a sustained argument for Jesus as messiah, is for Jews who knew Greek, to convert them or to defeat them in an argument. 

The late Rev. Raymond Brown, a Catholic scholar of the first water, concedes anti-Jewish sentiment here.  At the very least, there was rivalry, sometimes intense.  That’s how it was in those days.

 

Tags: , ,

Today Dyson, tomorrow who?

On Today Show today on NBC, Melinda Henneberger, once-NYT reporter, now Slate contributor, says Obama is helped by the preacher-friend controversy because it puts to rest the idea that he’s a Muslim.  He “answered an altar call 20 years ago.”

On same show, Michael Dyson, the itinerant Afro-studies prof once at DePaul U., refers to “so-called inflammatory rhetoric” of the preacher friend and backs him up in his analysis of American history AND is a fervent Obama supporter.

Meanwhile, are we to believe no white people are going to rethink their Obama commitment when he merely rejects certain sayings of this preacher but not the preacher himself, for whom the sayings reflect his fervent beliefs — unless we think these spiels were aberrations for him, which no one is saying.

Obama likes the guy, is obviously quite comfortable with him as an individual, even has a warm relationship, even as the guy is a race-baiter of the first water.  Four years coming up of the smooth-talking left-wing president whose friends we have to ignore?  God bless and save America.

Tags: , , , ,

A church for Barack

No other churches for Obama to pick?

At some point, in some venue, Mr. Obama is going to have to give a speech directly addressing his longtime pastor’s views and answering a simple question: Why didn’t he find another church that didn’t include a leader who so frequently engaged in such hate speech?

That’s John Fund in WSJ.com’s Political Diary, voicing my very thought in the matter.  It’s been 30 years (this month, in fact) since I regularly attended church on assignment.  But I must say that there have to be other South Side churches and preachers — black, white, and indifferent — that don’t demagogue the Gospel.

But O. found something he was looking for in this church that he could find in no other, we assume, and now he’s stuck with this wild-man preacher.

Look, even Catholics can pick and choose among Catholic churches.  As a Protestant, O. is part of a tradition where picking and choosing got its biggest boost religion-wise.

He did not know about the man’s oratorical proclivities, he says.  He wasn’t there when he said this or that.  But how many sermons did O. have to miss not to catch the drift of this man, who is not a crazy uncle he inherited but a spiritual father whom he chose?

He was surprised to hear the man talks this way, as “so contrary to my own life and beliefs.”  If only he had known.

And where did those worshipers come from pictured in the video cheering the pastor on?  Did they pop in knowing he would uncork something big and exciting that day?  Were they surprised when he talked that way?

Tags: ,

In politics we trust . . .

Is there something sad and mysterious about this release from St. Sabina Church?

March 13, 2008 Vince Clark – 773.483.4300
ANOTHER C.P.S. STUDENT DIES
RALLY AT STATE OF ILLINOIS BUILDING

On Wednesday, another Chicago Public School student, Channon Taylor, died. Channon [age 18] was shot Saturday afternoon in the 1800 block of South Lawndale and died Wednesday. On Friday, March 14, as was promised, Rev. Michael Pfleger and Chicago Public Schools will lead a rally from
11 a.m. to 12 p.m. at The State of Illinois Building, located at 100 West Randolph.

Rev. Pfleger said, “Every time a child [!] dies we will put it in the face of state government and demand ‘Common Sense Gun Laws!’”

Please invite anyone to attend.

Why sad?  Why mysterious?  Besides the obvious reasons about kids being shot down on the street? 

It’s that city and neighborhood leadership, in this case religious, clings so tenaciously to a legislative straw as the solution to their problems.  [Candidate Obama wants no part of it, by the way.]

Is it too much to ask for evidence of correlation between tighter gun control and reduced killing?  Or of successful enforcement of the laws we have or might have?

Newspapers don’t discuss this.  Who does?

These people do, for what’s it’s worth — here and here and here — to pick the first three sites shown by Google when you type “gun control.”

Tags: , ,

Bad stat not so bad after all . . .

Politically incorrect stuff hit the fan with the federal study of teenage girls that rang the alarm about sexually transmitted diseases and along the way found blacks more than twice as much affected or infected than whites, 50% to 20%.  Not to worry, however: the Center for Disease Control doc had an answer for this:

[Dr. John] Douglas said African-American girls are probably more vulnerable to STDs because of higher infection rates among blacks as a whole and less access to health care.

The numbers “[do] not mean African Americans are taking greater behavioral risks. In fact, research suggests the opposite,” he said.

OK.  For a minute there, we thought they caught more stuff because they did it more — were “taking greater behavioral risks,” as the doc said.

No.  Blacks in general are more infected, so sexual looseness is not to be suspected.  And they have “less access to health care.”

Hence the yawning chasm of difference.  Would the doctor please expand on that thesis?  More to the point, would somewhere in this land of ours a desk editor turn to the writer — in this case rewriter and Englisher of the AP copy — and ask her to give the doc a ring?

Times are hard, but a telephone call?  Is that too much to ask?

The writer did some calling, true.  She got this from the exec director of something called the Illinois Caucus for Adolescent Health:

“It’s a clear sign that something’s wrong in terms of the way we teach sex education, the way we talk about it, and the message we send to youth,” said Soo Ji Min . . .

. . . who could be on to something.  The message we send ignores the option of keeping one’s knickers in place, maybe?  We can only guess.  No one asked, apparently.

Tags: , ,

From evil comes good . . .

According to the ever-observant John Fund in the (dirt cheap) subscription-only WSJ.com’s Political Diary, Congr. Charlie Rangel of NY has his eye on the prize of a Gov. Spitzer resignation, if and when:

Should Mr. Spitzer resign, Mr. Rangel would . . . be in the catbird’s seat. Lt. Gov. David Paterson, a former state senator from Harlem, is a longtime protege of Mr. Rangel and would likely grant his mentor wide influence over patronage and fiscal issues. “Rangel could have instant access to Paterson anytime of the day or night,” is how one New York Democratic leader evaluates Mr. Rangel’s likely importance in a Patterson administration.

The ebullient Charlie smells the meat acookin’, to use the old Illinois expression. 

It’s how Paul Powell, who died with $800G in shoeboxes in his closet, put it.  Powell was one of the imprisoned former Ill. secretary of state (and governor) George Ryan’s predecessors in that office.

“A big old country boy , [he] could shake you down and make you like him,” per a boyhood friend.  That’s certainly a knack for government.

Tags: , , ,

McCain explains

In response to objections to his endorsement by televangelist John Hagee, who has called the Catholic Church “the great whore” and a “false cult system” and “the apostate church,” McCain offered a delayed response:

Republican presidential candidate John McCain on Friday repudiated any views of a prominent televangelist who endorsed him last month “if they are anti-Catholic or offensive to Catholics.”

If? He’s not sure?

And he said this only after criticism by The Dreadful Pelosi, that eminent Defender of the Faith from San Francisco.

Running for office, he rejects “any comments that are made” but not the commenter. This is standard gobbledygook apology, of course, long since perfected by offenders awaiting sentencing.

On the other hand, “Minister” Farrakhan loves Obama, doesn’t he, but O.? What O. said about that briefly took wind from opponent’s sails in his recent debate with What’s-her-name, just after he had feinted and dodged some Tim Russert qq.

And Farrakhan tore into Catholicism a few years back, didn’t he? He was quizzed by Russert in 1997, who quoted him:

“We just got to tell the truth. Catholicism has been by white people, for white people, to subject black people to a white kind of theology that strips us of ourselves.” That was you in 1994 [said Russert].

And [Catholics] particularly took great offense to Khallid Muhammad, your former chief spokesman, who said [in 1993], “The old no-good Pope–you know that cracker, somebody needs to raise that dress up and see what’s really under there.” Do you understand why Catholics take offense and believe that you are bigoted towards them?

As for McCain and Hagee:

“We’ve had a dignified campaign, and I repudiate any comments that are made, including Pastor Hagee’s. . . .

“I sent two of my children to Catholic school. I categorically reject and repudiate any statement that was made that was anti-Catholic, both in intent and nature. I categorically reject it, and I repudiate it,” McCain said.

Point is, does he recognize the Hagee quotes and does he go beyond a blanket repudiation? No, because he’s a politician running for office, like Mutt & Jeff on the other side, for neither of whom would I cast my vote for dogcatcher.

And speaking of politicians, note this well, that Rev. Michael Pfleger of Chicago has endorsed Farrakhan, to whom he has surrendered the pulpit of St. Sabina’s Church on the South Side and whom he has called “a gift from God to a sick, sick world.”

Tags: , , ,

Anything?

If Obama is a rock-star candidate, this babe, recently relieved of her duties as a key foreign-policy advisor for identifying Hillary as (that is, calling her) a monster, is a groupie:

In America, Miss [Samantha] Power has been compared to Condoleeza Rice.

“I’m nothing like her,” she says. “I don’t have any conventional political ambition.”

But if Mr Obama wins the Presidential race she is likely to remain a powerful force. “I’d do anything he asked me to do. It’s not about working for the next President of the United States, it’s Obama. If he ran General Motors I’d be working for him.”

He’s got her vote.

Tags: , ,

Laugh and the world laughs with you: SNL knows

The lemmings turned?

Over the last few days, the tone of the Democratic contest seems to have shifted, with Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s campaign more buoyant and Senator Barack Obama’s more defensive.

That shift may be traceable in part to the “Saturday Night Live” show on Feb. 23, when, back from the writers’ strike, it mocked the news media for treating Mr. Obama more gently than it treated Mrs. Clinton.

Mrs. Clinton amplified that view later in a debate, and her aides stoked it all week, practically browbeating reporters.

They are so little sure of themselves?  So much with finger to the wind?  The public press is a public trust and all that, but who can withstand Saturday Night Live?

Of course, this is NY Times reportage, ignoring Chicago newspaper coverage of B.O., which did not begin only this week to press him on important issues.

Tags: ,