Sinners’ solution

Book of Daniel today throws book at Israelites, meaning latter-day Israelites, namely us, for our purposes.  They got the message but ignored it:

We have sinned, been wicked and done evil;
we have rebelled and departed from your commandments and your laws.

In the 79th Psalm, we ask God not to hold it against us:

Remember not against us the iniquities of the past;
may your compassion quickly come to us,
for we are brought very low.

Luke 6 has the answer:

“Stop judging and you will not be judged.
Stop condemning and you will not be condemned.
Forgive and you will be forgiven. . . . “

That’s the ticket.

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Who do you think [they’re] talking to?!

J. Kass and I both want to know who tipped Baltimore Sun/Chi Trib off to O’Bama’s ancestors as slave-owners.  A thought for the newspaper and other media mavens: What if newsies regularly said who suggested this or that story?  That way, we readers would know whom they are talking to.  We can guess, of course, but newsies would gain credibility if they spilled these beans.

Another thing, why does neither Trib nor Sun-Times say what kind of gangs these are whose members stabbed and beat up the off-duty cop on Lincoln Ave. at 4 a.m. — Puerto Rican probably, but why don’t they tell us? 

Also, notice that all eyes are on the cop, as to his behavior in the beating: how did his gun go off, for instance?  (As he fell, stabbed.)  But nothing about his dereliction of duty in not sticking its barrel into the mouth of the nearest punk as he and friends barbarously confronted him and his friends?  We know why: the cop has to be nicey-nice and must not unduly intimidate the barbarous gang members.  Of course.

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From Reader Nancy:

Most likely the violent gang members are illegals.

Yet later: Probably NOT.  See NOT Puerto Rican gangsters! above.

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Greeley bombs in Jesus-land

Devastating review of Andrew Greeley’s Jesus: A Meditation on His Stories and His Relationships with Women in Sun-Times:

Was Jesus eye candy? A dreamy Messiah who could walk on water and make women swoon? Does it matter?

Andrew Greeley caves to appearance-obsessed Americans in Jesus: A Meditation on His Stories and His Relationships With Women. This Jesus heals hearts and melts them, too.

The reviewer, Susan Hogan/Albach [sic] is billed as a veteran religion writer in Dallas and Minneapolis. She gives Greeley credit for writing “many distinguished books,adding, “but this isn’t one of them.” She praises him for “extolling [she means exhorting!] Catholics to rediscover the religious imagination that distinguishes and anchors their faith.”

But she skewers this book, which she says

reads like an adolescent fantasy about manhood and priesthood (priests represent Jesus). It’s salvation through titillation. Women are portrayed as shallow — a mindless mass of bodily desires who fall all over Jesus like Brad Pitt groupies.

She quotes the book to make the point:

“Because he represented the Father-in-Heaven … Jesus had to be the most charming man who ever lived,” Greeley writes. “His eyes, his expressions, his smiles, his posture, his laughter, must have melted human hearts, male and female.”

. . . . Greeley’s Jesus is a handsome, heavenly and happy celibate.

“Handsome people charm,” writes Greeley . . .

This is Greeley the romance novelist, letting his imagination run away with him. The man needs an editor but probably wouldn’t put up with one.

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From Reader Cynthia:

Clearly, Greeley didn’t bother reading the part of the Bible that states that “He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.” It was all spiritual. Or, as Jesus said, the people who came to him are those whom God drew to him.

From Reader D:

This review, if accurate, makes the book repulsive to me. (Well, like most of Greeley’s books.)

If we know St. Paul was a runt of a man with a hook nose and maybe a receding hairline — and he mesmerized everyone — why did Jesus have to be a super stud to have the same effect?

We have the shroud of Turin as a guide — they figure Jesus was taller than the average man of his day — if he had arresting eyes and a muscular build (as Fr. Corapi points out, a carpenter-before-power-tools) and a voice that made the message indelible — why would he stoop to tempting women to see him as a sex object? Why would he set it up so that women would be so distracted by their hormones they wouldn’t grasp his wisdom?

Boy, I hate thinking Jesus was a self-centered metro-sexual who would have blow-dried his hair if he could have. It goes without saying, in Greeley’s Gospel, the Women of Jerusalem on the Via Dolorosa, were groupies, eh?

I’m reminded of that poem Sheen used to quote about If Jesus Went to Birmingham — at the end “He cried for Calvary…”

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Respecting nature

Here’s a late-18th-century argument against abortion from a feminist milestone book:

“Women becoming, consequently, weaker, in mind and body, than they ought to be, [if] one of the grand ends of their being [were] taken into account, that of bearing and nursing children, have not sufficient strength to discharge the first duty of a mother; and sacrificing to lasciviousness the parental affection, that ennobles instinct, either destroy the embryo in the womb, or cast it off when born. Nature in everything demands respect, and those who violate her laws seldom do so with impunity.”

That’s Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797) in her A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, quoted in an email from Feminists for Life.

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Left in Cuba

Chi Trib’s Gary Marx and two other reporters have to leave the island paradise, but why are others still there? asks Investor’s Business Daily. 

Earlier this week, unexpelled Reuters correspondent Marc Frank wrote about Cuba’s latest failed sugar harvest, making no effort to look up why government price-setting creates the same disastrous result over and over. Like the Soviets of old, he blamed the weather.

Not everything Frank [an ex-People’s Daily World staffer] does is bad, but [he] states in many of his reports that Cuba’s economic problems are a byproduct of the U.S. embargo rather than the failures of socialism.

Not to be outdone, Anita Snow of the Associated Press is the go-to person for every Western fringe leftist visiting Cuba and parroting Castro’s priorities.

I’d say any time one is expelled by a government, the others are to be examined.  Remember: CNN hung on in Iraq by reporting Sadaam’s election victories with a straight face and ignoring atrocities, later claiming they could not report them without endangering sources.

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Chauffeurs for everybody!

This $70G chauffeur story has legs, let me tell you.  Correction on State of Blago posted a few days ago: It’s the Dept. of HS, not HR: that’s [In]Human Services, which apparently supplies In-service training for apparent liars and (female) sexual predators:

Legislators say state official lying on drivers

SPRINGFIELD — The head of state government’s largest [!] agency denied Wednesday that she and her top aide hired taxpayer-funded chauffeurs, but that’s not what her chief of staff said under oath last year in a federal sex harassment lawsuit.

While we’re at it, kudos (singular of Greek word for hearty congratulations, not plural of kudo) to Dave McKinney, Chris Fusco, Whitney Woodward (what, no email address?), and their editors for a good, hard lede.

It’s still the state of Blago, by the way, but he’s not in the story.

Later: Oops, he’s there:

[Pajama Lady] Wertz also testified that she and Estes [the chauffeur], who didn’t have a high-school diploma, were hired after working on Gov. Blagojevich’s campaign. She said both knew Louanner Peters, who is now one of Blagojevich’s two deputy governors.

Blago, we can’t say we hardly knew ye.

Non-discovery: George Who?

The Discovery Channel’s hot video about Jesus’ tomb (and his wife Mary’s and their kids’) “makes a great story for a TV film. But it’s completely impossible. It’s nonsense,” Professor Amos Kloner of Bar Ilan University, who oversaw the original archeological dig 27 years ago, told the Jerusalem Post.

Galilee people like Jesus didn’t have family tombs in Jerusalem, for one thing.  the names are common and not conclusive, for another:

It would be like finding a tomb with the name “George” on it in the future and people asserting that it must have been the tomb of President George Bush,

Hebrew University archeologist and epigraphist Leah DiSegni told Cybercast News.

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Today in Chi Trib: God in politics, etc.

1. John Kass mixes politics and religion — it’s about time — and continues to keep us informed, providing a program by which we tell the players, but that’s another metaphor, is it not?  See Day of reckoning at shrine of St. Richie on this day the Lord has made, on which we celebrate Term Six, on which also we have to wonder who’s next in the Ruling Family.  At least four more years, less than that actually, before we have a glimmer.

Election Day in Chicago still is a political day of obligation, and though Tuesday’s low voter turnout suggests many have fallen into apostasy, even heretics like me know the rituals must be observed.

There you have it.

2. Mention is there of priest who praised the felonious Sorich, who defrauded taxpayers by keeping the fix in place when hiring public servants.  He is Reverend Daniel J. Brandt.  It’s “a Gospel-based Catholic community that truly strives through worship, ministry and service to live, grow and be challenged by the message of Jesus Christ,” which is good to know.  Also good to know is that “Here at Nativity of Our Lord Parish, all are welcome.”

Even federal prosecutors?

3. It was probably Father Brandt who made the Trib with an Oct. 11, 2006, letter to the editor signed Daniel J. Brandt, Chicago, in which he castigated an earlier letter writer for “anti-Catholic bias” for saying church leaders “always” cover up “inappropriate” actions.  “In fact,” he wrote, Catholic clergy commit “far fewer” such acts than their “counterparts in other Christian and non-Christian denominations.”

Pastors in Protestant and other churches have an occurrence more than twice that of Catholic churches. Public school teachers, five times greater. Coaches, seven times greater. Stepfathers, 11 times greater!

He said the writer “should check her facts before writing such a toxic, opinionated letter.”

A commenter cited the April 17, 2002, USA Today and National Review Online for “shocking figures that don’t make it to the news” that back up Brandt’s assertions.

4. Team-building at DePaul U. for b-school students here.  Do silly things together, you can work better together?  In any case, individualists need not apply.  95 of them in the cafeteria!  Collectivism in the work place!  Winsome pix on p. 2 of Metro section.  Can’t find link.

5. Zuckman-Madhani lede is so soft it hurts:

 WASHINGTON — By most measures, congressional Democrats should have the political wind at their backs on the Iraq war. They swept to power last November because of the public’s dissatisfaction with the conflict and poll numbers show a majority of the public wants to bring the troops home.

Patience.  The real lede is in graf 2:

Democrats in the House and Senate are struggling to find the best way to express congressional disapproval of the war and President Bush’s troop buildup. They are wary both of going too far and not going far enough as they try to strike a balance that most Democrats, and perhaps some Republicans, can support.

In other words, they are currently stymied.

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