When I was three, I thought the blogs revolved around me, I was wrong

And so I sing along

And if you watch, watch blogs with me…

First, A. Beam has created the contest entry to beat. I’ve received lots of great entries–keep ’em coming, folks; I’ll announce the winner next Wednesday–but so far, PoohPundit really puts the spring in Springfield.

And the Blog of Eternal Vigilance, Overlawyered.com, has linked me. I dunno what I bring to the party, but you should check out Overlawyered–constant updates on the insanity of our tort-infested world, plus legal insight and humor.

Now, the blogwatch.

Michael Dubruiel: Excellent, must-read post on “how to not lose your faith” despite the current crisis in the Church. Please read it. Everything we want to say about this scandal, the Bible has said before us; everything we forget in the heat of the 10 O’Clock News, the Bible recalls to us. Also, burying the dead and visiting the sick.

Brink Lindsey: Always look on the bright side of existential crises. I think Lindsey may be ignoring one of the driving forces behind existentialism’s anguish: its apprehension that the only sources of meaning left, when God is dead, are self and culture. Either what I want, or what my culture dictates; either self-absorption or conformity. There are basic epistemological reasons that secular philosophy has found no source of truth besides self or culture, but it all comes back to the problem I faced the summer after I was confirmed.

It was one of only two times that philosophical doubt has made me physically ill (the other was at my Confirmation… fun stuff). I lay awake, thinking about all the possible sources of moral truth and purpose, and none of them seemed big enough for this bitter little world. I certainly wasn’t adequate; any “moral truth” grounded in what I want could only mirror every twist, tangle, and wrong turn of my own knotted psyche. My culture wasn’t adequate; hadn’t I always been countercultural, and admired those who bucked the culture in the name of what’s right? And so I tried to come up with some other source of moral truth, and I failed. I didn’t even see how I could recognize such truth if it were presented to me. It was a lousy night. And in the morning, some certainties returned, and ultimately I worked my way back to the certainty that has been the basis of my life since then: Love is the basis of ethics.

But love of another person is not enough; there must be some outside standard by which we can determine what we should do to succor that person. That requires communication between us and the Divine–the One/True/Good/Beautiful–the God Who is love. (Interestingly, but perhaps not surprisingly, the relationships between ethics, love, the beloved person, and God here mirror the relationships between philosophy in general, reason, the community of reasoners, and God in the encyclical Fides et Ratio. At least, I think they do–hard to tell sometimes with this philosophy-prof Pope.)

So the needed certainty that returned to me that summer morning was not just that love is the basis of ethics, but that love is more than a capitulation to my wants, a submission to another human’s wants, or a detente-like negotiation between two clashing sets of wants. Existentialist despair denies that premise; modernist sunniness denies its importance. In other words, to get back to Lindsey’s post, existentialist despair isn’t about freedom. It’s about love and meaning, which make the difference between liberation and abandonment, the free man and the lost man.

And Lindsey also gives us clone-o-rama. It’s a good summary of a position I obviously disagree with, but I won’t say much about it here. I refer all those interested in my view on the “start protecting ’em when their brain waves start” position here, and my take on reproductive cloning here. On genetic engineering, I’m not totally sure, but my default position is agreement with Lindsey.

Charles Murtaugh (another one of those Amy Welborn people I’m going to stop blogwatching as soon as I fix my template and give him a permanent link): Biology, race, and challenging our assumptions.

Privateer’s Savage Warblog: Hey, dude, you’re not the first pirate of the blogosphere…

Mark Shea: St. Augustine feels the earth move under his feet. Good read for those who think the Church capitulated to scientific discoveries in embarrassment, rather than taking rational exploration of the natural world as a perfectly kosher endeavor.

Emily Stimpson has a lot of good stuff today–and justified outrage about a blue stone frog–but my computer just wigged and I can’t link to her individual posts. Go check her out if you want chocolatey Catholic goodness.

Unqualified Offerings: Why did Constantinople get the works? Because of those imperialist conquerors, the Turks. Plus, he really digs the new Elvis Costello album. Developing…

Eugene and Sasha Volokh: The Volokhs rokh. (Sorry.) A call for Constitutional amendments (I don’t know how best to word a Human Life Amendment, but if I get one I want that one; I’m very interested to see what other amendments are proposed); good post on the definition of “commercial speech”; and two good pieces on slavery as the motive for Southern secession. The one thing I’ll add is that I’m pretty sure the “Civil War was really about tariffs” position gained popularity as a Marxist position, so it’s a bit weird to see libertarians taking it up. If memory serves, the tariffs-not-slavery position is part of a larger belief system in which every world event is primarily motivated by economics; the proclaimed causes of wars are never their real causes; and Yankee “wage slavery” was not all that different from actual chains-and-whips chattel slavery. It’s certainly not a stance that only a Marxist can take (for example, Charles Adams, the historian Lew Rockwell cites to back up his claims), but again, I’m pretty sure the tariffs-uber-alles position’s popularity is due as much to Marxism as to, say, contrarianism or Southern feel-goodism.

Matt Welch: Blogging, “whoa… I’m an entrepreneur,” and the American character–great stuff.