"Hail to thee, blithe Spirit! Bird thou never wert, That from Heaven, or near it, Pourest thy full heart In profuse strains of unpremeditated art."
Christian Sci Monitor has a wonderful story by a staff writer about his four-year-old adjusting to life in DC once he was helped to discover the DC Metro subway. They had moved from Maine, where the great outdoors were his playground. Now in the DC area, he chafed under restraints of apt. living but learned to love going underground.
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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.
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.
* 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.
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.
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.”
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.
Cardinal George got a kindly reception at abuse-plagued St. Agatha Church yesterday but couldn’t keep his sharp, logical tongue in check anyhow.
Asked as he left the friendly St. Agatha confines what he thought of Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP) protesting his imminent election as president of the U.S. bishops conference, he said, “I don’t think they have any credibility on that issue.”
A low blow? Or badly aimed, as gun shot at one’s foot by the church leader who has nothing to say about his priest’s felonious sexual assault on children in his care but to call it “tragedy.”
Isn’t tragedy what you can’t avoid? The horrors visited by the gods, or for us Christians, God, willy-nilly? The Greeks — Sophocles and the like, not restaurant-owners coast to coast — made an excess of a good thing. Your chief virtue did you in, you got a big head, fell victim to hubris, and there you were, caught in disaster not entirely of your making.
Not so. Today, even for learned prelates, a tragedy is something clearly bad though only vaguely to be blamed on anyone. So guns kill people, not people, the shot not the shooter, the SUV not the driver.
Likewise, who’s to blame for the dreadful incidents at St. Agatha? “We have tried to figure out where were the betrayals, what went wrong,” the cardinal told the eminently forgiving parishioners, gathered for him to install the new man as pastor.
Isn’t there something plaintive about that? We have tried. And trying is next to godliness, which robs protesting SNAP of its credibility, does it not? Is there hubris in that?
Moreover, there may be more to this than has met the eye so far, said George:
“A lot of that is still a story that is not truly told, for various reasons,” George said. “Sometimes things don’t become really clear for many years, and sometimes, perhaps, not until Christ returns.”
Whoa. Not truly equals falsely, I think. Various reasons? Uh-oh. Someone’s been lying, though this churchman would prefer not to use the word. And why? We don’t know, and may never know until the Second Coming.
Is that nonsense, or what? We do know that no one has been penalized for letting the offender not only pass but thrive under George — who made him a vicariate dean, for gosh sakes, weeks before his arrest. In fact, nothing has slowed the promotion machine, as Sun-Times pointed out months ago:
Top leaders in the Archdiocese of Chicago responsible for complaints about predatory priests kept their positions or rose in the church in the aftermath of the Rev. Daniel McCormack’s 2006 arrest, according to archdiocesan reports and interviews. Vicar General George Rassas was elevated to auxiliary bishop. Chancellor Jimmy Lago was named the primary point person on child abuse cases. Leaders from the offices of Vicar for Priests to Protection of Children and Youth stayed in key positions,
the paper had last July — scroll down and pay $2.95 to see whole article. Must we wait for Jesus in a cloud of glory to know what all that’s about?
Meanwhile, what would it be like to hear from George’s lips “disgusting” about the abuser’s behavior? Can he say he feels “lousy” about it? He should at least try. It would be quite an improvement on invoking mystery and getting snappish with SNAP.
This story is in the shop for repairs. Thanks for your patience.
Rev. Donald McGuire SJ will remain free on bond pending appeal of his 2006 conviction, vs. attempt by his prosecutor to send him back because of the civil suit saying he committed abuse as recently as 2003.
ELKHORN, Wis. (AP) – A judge says a prominent Jesuit priest convicted of molesting high school students in the 1960s can remain free on bond despite a new allegation of abuse.
Walworth County Judge James Carlson rejected the motion, saying the claims have not been proven.
ABC-TV 7 also has this story.
