Thank God for Pope Benedict XVI

Segements of the press exploded with vitriol against Pope Benedict XVI this week. Why? Because he took the knife to one of their sacred cows--sexual license--in his Christmas greeting. Here are some quotes from an article posted on LifeSiteNews.com:

During his exchange of Christmas greetings with the Roman Curia this morning, Pope Benedict XVI noted that the Church "cannot and should not limit herself to transmitting just the message of salvation to her faithful." It must also he said "protect the human being against self-destruction" - a destruction which comes from a warped understanding of marriage and human sexuality.

"It is necessary to have something like an ecology of the human being, understood in the proper manner," said the Pope. "It is not a surpassed metaphysics when Church speaks of the nature of the human being as man and woman, and demands that this order of creation be respected."

Unless we "listen to the language of creation" he said, we end up with "destruction of the work of God." The Pope suggested that the gender ideology which seeks to redefine the sexes to allow for homosexuality, transgenderism and such things are examples of mankind separating himself "from creation and the Creator." With such attempts to decide for himself, mankind "lives against the truth and the Spirit of the Creator."

Appealing to concern for the environment to heighten awareness of the gravity of the matter, Pope Benedict said, "Yes, the tropical rainforests deserve our protection, but man, as a creature is no less deserving" of protection. Rather than a limit of our freedom, the Pope emphasized that it was a condition of that freedom.

Note to American bishops--speaking the truth to power like Pope Benedict is doing here is part of your job description. Please take heed.

Book Review -- The Whiskey Rebels

Not long ago--certainly within the living memory of anyone approaching the age of 40--nearly every novel, movie, and television adventure show featured a white male hero. When people outside that mold appeared at all, they were invariably either victims to be rescued, sidekicks, or villains. But within the past 20 years, that paradigm has been completely turned on its head. In The Whiskey Rebels we see what happens when the postmodern cult of the anti-White male reaches its absurd climax and history must be tortured to accommodate it.

The Whiskey Rebels is a decently written novel. It is a page-turner in the worst sense of that term. That is, the author's prose is sufficiently punchy to keep you turning pages to see what happens next. Unfortunately, what usually happens next is "not much." The plot is disjointed and full of unsurprising surprise twists. The dialog is what you'd expect from a "made for HBO" type historical adventure. There are scenes that make the reader groan out loud thanks to bizarre and totally unnecessary sexual imagery.

My real problem with this book, however, was the characters who were little more than pawns acting out a morality play in the 21st century mode. The "hero" is Captain Saunders, a wrongfully disgraced Revolutionary War officer. About two-thirds of the book is written from his perspective and he sees himself as an exceptionally dashing and clever fellow. The reader soon discovers, however, that he is a scoundrel and a drunken boob who, unbeknownst to him, is being manipulated by the other characters in the book.

The other third of the book is told through the eyes of Joan Maycott, a brilliantly self-educated woman who moved to the frontier with her husband. Though cheated and brutalized by the local aristocrat and his thugs, the Maycotts and the other hearty frontier folk find success in developing a new way to make whiskey. But the imposition of the federal tax on whiskey exacerbates tensions on the frontier and Maycott is left a widow seeking revenge on the federal reprobates and speculators who ruined her life. She and her Whiskey Boys infiltrate Philadelphia and launch a complex financial scheme to utterly destroy the creature they feel most responsible for their plight.

The other major protagonists in the book are as follows: Kyler Lavien--a kind of Jewish ninja in the employ of Alexander Hamilton who has neatly compartmentalized his idyllic family life from his day job as a spy/assassin; Leonidas--Saunder's slave who is presented as ten times the man his master is; Dalton and Richmond--two whiskey boys who the author "outs" inelegantly and then puts forth the ludicrous idea that everyone on the frontier was perfectly fine with their arrangement; and Skye, an older Scottsman and one of the whiskey boys whose main purpose in the novel is to be a rejected suitor for the widow Maycott.

The villains are all, without exception, rich white males.

So the old trope has now been completely inverted. Once you realize this, the course of events is easily predicted.

Let me just say that I find tales like this to be just as tedious and uncreative as the ones of yore in which only rich, white men could be the heroes.

A couple of the Founding Fathers pass through the pages of The Whiskey Rebels. Alexander Hamilton is presented enigmatically--of course, he is shown sneaking off to visit his mistress. George Washington appears in one scene, though the author seemed fixated upon Washington's false teeth more than anything else.

So in short, this book was a disappointment. Not exactly a yawner, but simply annoying in that the author seems to be nothing more than a politically correct trend-follower. Personally, I'm tired of those.

For those of you interested in the true history of the Pennsylvania frontier, which is infinitely more interesting than this book, I recommend going to some of the primary sources which are easily available these days. Try the Early Colonial Bookshop for a good list.

Abortion not linked with depression?

A news article is floating around today claiming that there is no link between abortion and depression:

A team at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore reviewed 21 studies involving more than 150,000 women and found the high-quality studies showed no significant differences in long-term mental health between women who choose to abort a pregnancy and others.

"The best research does not support the existence of a 'post-abortion syndrome' similar to post-traumatic stress disorder," Dr. Robert Blum, who led the study published in the journal Contraception, said in a statement.

Worse, the academics behind this article simply declare that evidence to the contrary is "low quality" and "politically motivated."

How about a little transference with your baloney sandwich?

But hey, maybe these clowns are on to something. There may be less evidence of depression among post-abort women because many of these poor totured souls opt to commit suicide instead.

Suicides after pregnancy in Finland, 1987-94: register linkage study

Here's the money quote from this article:

The mean annual suicide rate was 11.3 per 100 000. The suicide rate associated with birth was significantly lower (5.9) and the rates associated with miscarriage (18.1) and induced abortion (34.7) were significantly higher than in the population.

I reckon this is one of those "low quality" studies Dr. Blum was referring to above.

Wouldn't it be nice if the medical and mental health communities got back into the business of actually helping people and not making immoral, counter-intuitive or just obviously wrong political statements?

No freedom of choice for Catholics -- Why FOCA is evil

FOCA, the so-called "Freedom of Choice Act" is anything but.

This wicked bill will immediately declare all reasonable restraints on abortion (the killing of a baby in the womb) null and void. Gone will be any common sense limits passed by voters in the individual states on partial-birth abortion, parental notification for abortions performed on children under the age of 18, and most ominously of all, the ability of pro-life physicians and medical personnel to opt out of performing abortions for reasons of conscience.

This bill is anti-Democratic, anti-American, and supremely evil. Catholic bishops in the US are already threatening to close hospitals rather than comply with this act. Bishop Thomas Paprocki of Chicago made the following statement regarding FOCA:

"There are grave consequences. If Catholic hospitals were required by federal law to perform abortions, we'd have to close our hospitals."

Nearly 100 Catholic bishops across America are echoing these words.

We should all keep in mind that nearly 1/3 of our nation's hospitals are Catholic-run. Can you imagine the crisis that closing even a fraction of these hospitals would cause?

FOCA must be defeated. Urge president-elect Obama to denounce the bill in no uncertain terms.

Book Review: The Man Who Was Thursday

To this point in my life, I've now read three works by Chesterton. I enjoyed his epic poem Ballad of the White Horse a great deal. His bio of Saint Thomas Aquinas left me somewhat befuddled. After I finished it, I felt I knew no more about the great saint than when I started. However, I had read something — a lot of something, in fact — just don't ask me to tell you what.

The Man Who Was Thursday is a completely different work from the abovementioned pair. It is subtitled "A Nightmare" and that's exactly how it reads. It starts out like a quirky spy/detective novel, but as the plot progresses, it becomes obvious that this is no typical pot-boiler. It is well to keep in mind when reading this book that Chesterton was a master of paradox. In an interview recorded in a biography by Maisie Ward, Chesterton once summarized the book by saying: "In an ordinary detective tale the investigator discovers that some amiable-looking fellow who subscribes to all the charities, and is fond of animals, has murdered his grandmother, or is a trigamist. I thought it would be fun to make the tearing away of menacing masks reveal benevolence."

To summarize the plot is to give away much of what makes this book an enjoyable read, so I will refrain. And to my mind, the plot is almost coincidental to what makes this book interesting. It is a mere plastic tree (if an oddly shaped one) upon which Chesterton hangs a myriad of literary ornaments. The book is simply littered with gems which sparkle even out of context. Here are a few of my favorites:

"We deny the snobbish English assumption that the uneducated are the dangerous criminals....We say that the most dangerous criminal is the educated criminal. We say that the most dangerous criminal is the entirely lawless modern philosopher. Compared to him, burglars and bigamists are essentially moral people."

"The modern world has retained all those parts of police work which are really oppressive and ignominious....It has given up its more dignified work, the punishment of powerful traitors the in the State and powerful heresiarchs in the Church. The moderns say we must not punish heretics. My only doubt is whether we have a right to punish anybody else.”

"The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all."

The Man Who Was Thursday can be read and appreciated on two different levels--as an entertaining bit of absurdity that, in some sections, prefigures a Monty Python routine, or as an allegory with significant theological depth. I enjoyed it a great deal on both levels.

To conclude, let me simply say that this is the kind of book that I will need to re-read at some future point, perhaps a couple times, to make sure I didn't miss anything. Fortunately, Chesterton's prose is so merry and brisk that the re-read will be a pleasure rather than a trial.

Mar Simeon the Stylite

Here's an image I found of Saint Simeon the Stylite on Google Books. It's a bit "stylized" (forgive the bad pun), but still interesting.

The Early Poems of Alfred, Lord Tennyson Ed. with a Critical Introduction, Commentaries and Notes, Together with the Various Readings By Alfred Tennyson Tennyson, John Churton Collins: ""

My visit to Holy Name Cathedral in Chicago

I like to visit local churches when I'm on business travel. Two weeks ago, I was in Chicago and decided to drop in on Holy Name Cathedral on a Saturday afternoon. Knowing what I do about recent Catholic history in Chicago, I was expecting to see yet another example of "wreckovation". Sadly, I wasn't far off.

The exterior of the Cathedral is still quite lovely. Here are two photos:

And from another angle:

Once inside, though, the ambiance was something not quite Catholic. By way of comparison, here's a photo of the inside of the Cathedral circa 1958 before the "modernizaton" took place.
And here's what the interior looks like today (apologies for the blur):

The ceilings, columns, and floor remain quite beautiful, but notice the apse in particular which has been almost completely desacralized. Also notice the disappearance of religious statues.

When I entered, the organist was playing some horrible 12-tone piece that seemed better suited for a slasher movie than for a Catholic cathedral. With that noise echoing throughout the vast space, it was impossible to pray. So instead, I went and visited the bookstore in the basement. To my surprise, the selection of books and religious items on sale was excellent and I walked out with a Byzantine/Russian style icon of Our Lady Hodegetria.

By the time I left the bookstore, the "music" had ceased so I decided to say a rosary. At that point, I went looking for the tabernacle. Of course, there was no sign of it in the apse, and for a moment, I felt a little like Mary Magdalene on Easter morning when she said, "They have taken my Lord away and I don't know where they have put him." I found what I assumed was the tabernacle in one of the two side "chapels" flanking the apse. Calling them chapels is a stretch, however, as there are no altars in either of them. As works of religious art, both are horrifying:

I assume this piece was done in honor of the Blessed Virgin, although to me it looked more like a haphazard display of heavy bronze cobwebs.

The tabernacle was worse:

In this one, we see our Lord emerging from a Sputnik-like object which has apparently exploded in a taffy factory.

It was a bit difficult to pray with these disturbing images in front of me, and the cynical part of me speculated that this was the whole point of having them there. But I persevered. At least the huge, stylized crucifix hanging over the altar wasn't completely awful. The rose windows were also quite beautiful, but I suspect these were left untouched from the original construction.
The rear of the cathedral was dominated by the organ, which had a foreboding appearance--almost like the warp core of the starship Enterprise:

On a positive note, I was able to attend Confession at the cathedral, and there was a steady stream of penitents there when I went. As I left, I noticed that there is currently a capital campaign underway for the building, and refurbishment is in process on the exterior of the building. I can only hope this means that some major dewreckovation may be in the works on the interior as well in the not-too-distant future. It would be a shame to leave such a beautiful edifice so barren of religious adornment.

If

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you
But make allowance for their doubting too,
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream--and not make dreams your master,
If you can think--and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it all on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breath a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: "Hold on!"

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings--nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;
If all men count with you, but none too much,
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And--which is more--you'll be a Man, my son!


--Rudyard Kipling

Election Day

I'm happy to say I voted for McCain/Palin today. I pray that enough of my fellow Americans will do likewise so that we may continue building a Culture of Life here in the United States. An Obama victory would turn back the clock 35 years on Life and untold millions of innocent unborn babies' lives would be in jeopardy around the world.

If you value life and the family, you must get out and vote today. Vote to defeat Obama like lives depend on it.

Because they do.

Bishop: No Catholic can Vote for Barack Obama in Good Conscience

Here's an ad from a very courageous Bishop, his excellency, Rene Gracida.



The text of the ad is as follows:

This is Bishop Rene H. Gracida, reminding all Catholics that they must vote in this election with an informed conscience. A Catholic cannot be said to have voted in this election with a good conscience if they have voted for a pro-abortion candidate. Barack Hussein Obama is a pro-abortion candidate.

The ad is also available on YouTube in Spanish.

Please forward this ad to every Catholic you know. It took a lot of courage for Bishop Gracida to say this so forcefully. Please remember him in your prayers.

Alveda King, Niece of Martin Luther King Jr., endorses McCain-Palin

The following is taken from an article in today's Philadelphia Bulletin:

"I am very excited about the McCain-Palin ticket, simply because they support the values that mean the most to me," Ms. King said. "It is a plus to me that Sarah Palin is a woman because I've been elected to office as a wife and mother. I've been appointed to office as a woman and at the time I was a mother and became a grandmother." 



Ms. King said her experience taught her she could both be a good mother and still serve the public. This is something she has in common with Gov. Sarah Palin, R-Alaska, McCain's running mate.

However, the most important reason she is backing the McCain-Palin ticket is its commitment to the pro-life cause.

Click here to see the video mentioned in this article:

A Matter of Faith, Race and Politics

Brief review of Holmes: The Age of Justinian & Theodora (1905)

Having never discovered this particular history before in my research, I was looking forward to reading it after discovering it in the library. Now I know why hardly anyone cites it. The author, William Gordon Holmes, does not uphold even the pretense of scholarly objectivity. Never before have I run across an historian who displays such open contempt for his subject matter. The Byzantines were a deeply religious Christian people and Holmes openly and continuously decries the religious beliefs of late Roman Christians in language that is little short of vitriolic. And beyond this, he carries the attacks to modern Christians as well, claiming in one footnote that Christian beliefs spring either from ignorance or insanity.

In one particular 60-page tangent, Holmes offers his own version of the history of Christianity. Having little to do with his original subject, Holmes uses this digression to pontificate upon the "death" of Christianity in his time. In a footnote, he celebrates the lack of religious vocations and says that, "those who are engaged in impressing a belief in obsolete mythologies on the community should realize that they are doing an evil service to their generation." Ominously, Holmes predicts that the "Romish and Orthodox churches" will retain their power over the ignorant masses for a while longer "until at last they have to face suppression by force."

Perhaps worse, Holmes is a social Darwinist of the kind that flourished pre-WWII but is hardly to be found today (at least openly). In one place, he calls the modern Spanish people "unintelligent." He insinuates that Hawaiians are a lower race. And in another place, he envisions a future where "famous stallions should stand to cover brood mares in the human as well as the equine world."

Sadly, there is a good bit of useful data here in between Holmes's pompous paeans to atheism and eugenics. He gives a very useful, if occasionally inaccurate, tour of Justinianic Constantinople and his footnoting is generally very helpful when dealing with matters outside of religion. But unfortunately, this book is so completely saturated with the author's bloviating bigotry to make it a supremely obnoxious read for anyone but a hard-core anti-Christian atheist.

Ignore the polls

For those of you down in the dumps about Obama's poll numbers as compared to McCain's, take heed. It is my belief that the polls are being manipulated by the media in concert with the Democrats. The strategy is to make Obama seem like an irresistible force and to depress the conservative turn out in an attempt to create a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Here's an article from the NRO campaign spot that bolsters this theory. The money quote is as follows:

"Believe me, there is someone in the Obama campaign who is deathly afraid of the 'McCain pulls even or goes ahead' poll." (And in Gallup, it was within 2 percent.) "That Obama strategist knows how much depends on the whole Chuck Schumer and Rahm Emanuel approach —.work with the media to demoralize conservatives, and keep the perception of a juggernaut going. But a day or two of a few bad polls, and that strategy backfires. The conservatives know they've still got a shot at this."

Thus, the message for conservatives is to ignore the polls. If this theory is correct, no pollster will show McCain ahead for the duration of the election. In such a climate, the best thing to do is to assume McCain is 1% behind, and work like heck to get him elected. Volunteer. Call. Walk precincts. Vote!

Review of Thomas Mann's Death in Venice

If you like short stories about disgusting sexual attractions, suicide, and self-absorbed German narcissism, you'll love Death in Venice. Me, I don't much cotton to such themes in what I read, so I had trouble wading through this morass of early 20th century European bourgeoisie decadence. But as this book was the choice of our book club, I had to persevere.

Of the eight short stories contained in this book, I found only the three middle ones, Mario and the Magician (1929), Disorder and Early Sorrow (1925), and A Man and His Dog (1918) to be of any worth. The others--Death in Venice (1911), Tonio Kröger (1903), The Blood of the Walsungs (1905), Tristan (1902), and Felix Krull (1911)--range from simply tedious and uninsightful to gross and perverse. Interestingly, it is Mann's earlier stories that fall into that category. I suppose these stories were meant to have shock value in their day. But in an era when the most disgusting pornography is only a mouse-click away, they seem painfully trite and pedestrian today.

Mann's later stories are better, possibly because as he matured, Mann became a more skillful observer of the beauty and joy of everyday life. But if tinged with sentimentality, these stories don't really inspire. Of all the stories, Mario and the Magician is the only standout. It was the singular tale which kept me riveted with larger than life characters and underlying themes which got beyond the mundane or the merely sexual.

As a whole, this is exactly the type of work that made me dislike studying modern literature as a student. The prose is dense and despite Mann's impressive descriptive ability, the stories do little to uplift the human spirit. Instead, the reader is left encumbered with a myriad of very negative ideas and disturbing notions of humanity.

Of course, as I am reading Mann in an English translation, it is not impossible that his genius as a writer was more easily discerned in the original German. In English, it was fairly invisible to me. I say this as someone who loved writers like Dumas, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy in English translation.

Dems 4 McCain Flyer

Here's a downloadable flyer that should stir up some trouble. Use it to:

1.) Give to Democrat family members and friends.

2.) Give Democrat colleagues at work.

3.) Post around your college campus or on community bulletin boards.

4.) Place in in any public place where literature may be distributed.

5.) Hand out in front of post offices, train stations, or any other high-traffic area where it's legal to do so.

6.) Keep on you to give to any folks you meet with whom the election comes up as a subject of conversation.

It's a simple, no frills flyer that gets the point across. It's in color, but it looks just fine printed out on a standard laser printer or copy machine.

Click on the lo-res version of it below to download a PDF for easy printing (148K):

Farrakhan proclaims Obama the Messiah

No, I'm not kidding. Watch for yourself:

The publishing industry and liberal hypocrisy

For those of you who may not know, the publishing industry is almost completely run by liberals. Any debate on this should be ended by an August survey from Publishing Trends which showed a whopping 86% of respondents plan to vote for Barack Obama in November.

Yes, 86%.

Here's the real stunner, though. A survey in Publishers Weekly released in July of 2008, found the following:

The salary divide between men and women actually increased in 2007—men received an average salary increase of 4.5% last year, compared to 4.2% for women. Men earned an average salary of $103,822 last year, compared to $64,742 for women, and while one reason for the higher overall salary for men is that more men are in the higher paying management and sales side of the business, the discrepancy is in all segments, including editorial, where men out-earned women $67,000 to $48,000.

Yes, you read that right. In an industry where 86% of the folks self-identify as Obama-voting liberals, there isn't pay parity. In fact, it's not even close.

Now don't get me wrong. I fully understand the underlying reasons why women are generally paid less than men and why the whole issue of pay parity is a red herring. But it really irks me that the same leftists who moan and complain endlessly about such things can't even manage it in industries that they dominate.

But perhaps we shouldn't be surprised when the Obama campaign itself can't even manage pay parity between men and women--in stark contrast to the McCain campaign.

Letter to my State Senator and Assemblymen

Here's the letter I wrote to my local reps regarding this bill. Please feel free to use bits and pieces of it, or the whole thing, as you see fit.

---------------------------------------

Esteemed Representatives,

It has come to my attention the New Jersey Assembly will be considering a bill (ASSEMBLY Bill No. 3123) which sets new and unprecedented restrictions on the right of home education within the state of New Jersey.

There's an old saying (which admittedly uses improper grammar) which says: "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." The current laws in New Jersey which cover homeschooling work and are considered among the most liberal (in a good way) in the nation. This horrid bill would put New Jersey into the educational dark-ages. As you no doubt are aware, homeschoolers routinely score among the highest percentiles on national and state standardized tests and on average, perform well above their peers in public education. This trend has even been recognized by many universities who now actively recruit home educated children.

Given the successes I have observed among the homeschooling community, I would ask that you oppose this ill-advised and coercive bill and ask that it be withdrawn immediately before it messes up a good thing. Homeschoolers need more support from the state, not more restrictions and regulation.

Please be advised that I consider a vote in favor of this bill to be utterly disqualifying in terms of my future support, both in terms of my vote and who I contribute to in the next election.

Sincerely,

Etc.

Fighting for Homeschooling in NJ

Two NJ legislators, Democrat Sheila Y. Oliver District 34 (Essex and Passaic) and Democrat L. Harvey Smith District 31 (Hudson) have declared war on homeschoolers in New Jersey. Their bill which will make NJ the most homeschool-hostile state in the union, may be read here:

ASSEMBLY, No. 3123, STATE OF NEW JERSEY (Introduced September 22, 2008)

Ms. Oliver and Mr. Smith need to hear from all NJ homeschoolers right now. Here are their phone numbers. Also, click their names to take you to their pages at the NJ Legislature page. You can get their office addresses and send emails from there. I recommend doing all three:

Sheila Y. Oliver - (973-395-1166)
L. Harvey Smith - (201-536-7851)

The legislators sponsoring the anti-homeschooling bill are about to find out how networked homeschoolers are. Let's make them rue the day they ever tried to pull this nonsense.

NJ about to go Nanny State on Homeschoolers?

You knew it was only a matter of time. The liberal homeschooling laws in New Jersey are now under fire from two "concerned legislators" in Trenton.

Read it and get angry.

http://www.njleg.state.nj.us/2008/Bills/A3500/3123_I1.HTM

This needs to be hammered and hard if NJ homeschoolers are going to maintain their right to educate their children as they see fit without interference from the state.