Modern Eugenics

Last updated on: June 29, 2014 at 11:34 pm By David Mills

The eugenic impulse lives, among people who refuse to recognize that recognizing the dignity of every person means that some of them will do things you don’t want them to, like have more children, and that’s just life. Today’s example: California female inmates sterilized illegally. The California State Auditor on Thursday blasted federal and state oversight of sterilization surgeries for female prison inmates, finding numerous illegal surgeries and violations of the state’s informed consent law. . . . Of the 144 inmates... Read more

It’s a Funny Old World 2 (was 3)

Last updated on: June 28, 2014 at 10:32 am By David Mills

I think I understand the impulse for this new fad for wakes reported by the New York Times, in which the dead are posed in a tableaux representing or capturing their life. (Let me make the necessary qualification that a trend or fad the Times reports may not be such.) The Times reports: The phenomenon first appeared in Puerto Rico in 2008, four years before the first such funeral in New Orleans, with a 24-year-old murder victim whose viewing took place in... Read more

Mormonism & Christianity

Last updated on: June 28, 2014 at 10:35 am By David Mills

Yesterday I mentioned the appearance of Ron Paul, Sean Hannity, and Glenn Beck in the third part of Atlas Shrugged and in the course of expressing my surprise mentioned to problem of calling the Mormon Beck “an outspokenly Christian political player.” One may have problems with his appearing in the movie, but the problem is not that he’s a Christian appearing in an anti-Christian work. I wrote something on this a few years ago, which still expresses my thoughts on... Read more

Bring Back the Devil

Last updated on: June 28, 2014 at 5:23 pm By David Mills

There’s no avoiding the Devil, Tim Stanley explains in the Daily Telegraph weblog. The Church of England has had to make its attempt at new vows for the parents and godparents a little more explicit about sin, though not much. After objections from parishes, the Church hastily rewrote this one anodyne question into two – asking parents and godparents both to “reject evil” and “turn away from sin”. I suspect that this is “sin” not of the “Garden of Evil”, wholly “Original”... Read more

Paul, Hannity, Beck, & Rand

Last updated on: June 28, 2014 at 10:36 am By David Mills

Apparently Ron Paul, Sean Hannity, and Glenn Beck are appearing in part three of the movie Atlas Shrugged, because, as the movie’s producer explains, “Most people have a respect for spirituality, maybe even a yearning. There must be room in Objectivism for charity and benevolence.” Which is not Christianity, and isn’t Objectivism either. Which raises the question, she writes, after explaining just how anti-Christian Randianism is, of “why the sanguine agreement on the part of three outspokenly Christian political players to... Read more

Chesterton on the First Stage of Conversion

Last updated on: June 28, 2014 at 5:19 pm By David Mills

Earlier this morning I invoked Chesterton’s insight into conversion from his later book the Catholic Church and Conversion. In the first stage one comes to the Church’s defense or at least recognizes that she is being unfairly treated, a stage Chesterton calls “patronizing the Church.” Here’s the passage (the book can be found here): It is my experience that the convert commonly passes through three stages or states of mind. The first is when he imagines himself to be entirely detached, or even... Read more

Readings (25 June 2014)

Last updated on: June 25, 2014 at 8:13 am By David Mills

Why the Arab World Is Lost in an Emotional Nakba, and How We Keep It There, by Richard Landes, from The Tablet. [E]ven before literary critic Edward Saïd heaped scorn on “honor-shame” analysis in Orientalism (1978), anthropologists had backed off an approach that seemed to make inherently invidious comparisons between primitive cultures and a morally superior West. . . . But although “Any generous person should have a healthy discomfort with ‘othering,’” he writes, we should still be able to acknowledge that in some... Read more

Cheap Shots Can Bring People to the Church

Last updated on: June 28, 2014 at 5:20 pm By David Mills

Slate’s William Saletan hit Catholic writers with a cheap and silly shot for their explanations of Benedict’s resignation, as I wrote yesterday. But even cheap shots help. As G. K. Chesterton said in The Catholic Church and Conversion, the first stage of conversion is often feeling that someone’s being unfair to the Church. Many people, reading this kind of thing, will feel some sympathy for Pope Benedict and his Church, and from there they may find their way in. The blood... Read more

Saletan’s Cheap Shot

Last updated on: June 28, 2014 at 5:20 pm By David Mills

Yesterday in The Pope Till Death Do Us Part, Sometimes, I took minor issue with a possible implication of Bad Catholic’s idea that popes should resign more often. This reminded me of something I wrote for the “While We’re At It” section of First Things: Here it is: When Pope Benedict resigned, the world of commentary flowered with ignorance and goofiness like the desert after a rain, and with more than a little anti-Catholicism. Some writers delivered really cheap shots,... Read more

Readings (24 June 2014)

Last updated on: June 23, 2014 at 9:32 pm By David Mills

Our Abraham, Not Theirs, by David P. Goldman, from The Tablet. In a review of Jon Levenson’s Inheriting Abraham (published a year ago, but I just reread it and wanted to commend it), Goldman explains that Levenson argues that Misunderstanding is not what divides the image of Abraham in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, the misnomered “Abrahamic religions”; on the contrary, the founders of the younger religions well understood Abraham’s role in Judaism. St. Paul’s transformation of Abraham into the father of all... Read more