You are the blogwatch queen!

feel the beat from the tambourine

you can dance, you can jive

having the time of your life…

Disputations: A necessary point to consider when discussing the fact that more traditional religious orders and dioceses attract more vocations.

Mike Hardy is back, which is good. Prompted by him, I’ll probably blog a bit about a few leftover snippets of homo-Catholic stuff, but not right now.

Charles Murtaugh: Murtaugh, like others in the blogosphere, is unhappy that our government allied itself with Islamist tyrannies in order to prevent passage of a UN bill that would name “reproductive health services” (including abortion) as a human right. If you think abortion is a human right, I can see why you’d be against this–but I really don’t get Murtaugh’s position. He doesn’t think abortion is a human right, but he is too fastidious to make alliances with scummy dictators. How does he think anything gets done in the world? It’s almost never the case that international alliances–military, diplomatic, whatever–only include nice liberal democracies. I can see, if we were making concessions to the tyrannies, why this would be wrong–“You can kill your Christian converts if we can keep these ‘health services’ out of the women’s rights statement,” or, “You vote against abortion rights and we’ll vote against a woman’s right to separate from her husband [/drive/etc.]” But at least according to what I’ve read so far, that’s not what’s happening. So why is it wrong to team up, temporarily, with people who want the particular (very important) thing we want, even if their reasons for wanting it are really bad? Murtaugh’s stance seems pristine to the point of ineffectual. But, of course, maybe I’m missing something….

The Rat: More quotes from And Quiet Flows the Vodka. Very funny.

Unqualified Offerings: Petty despotism in Prince George’s County. Sigh.

The Volokh Conspiracy: Excellent points on why corporations should enjoy many Bill of Rights protections.

Amy Welborn: I know–I always tell you to read her–but I thought it might be worthwhile, for the few readers who could really use her site and don’t already make it a daily stop, to blogwatch her today just to show you what she does. More on that Brooklyn priest who “partied” with teenage boys, and what the bishop knew; acute comments from a (different) bishop; must-read: Ask not what you can do for God, ask what your church can do for you; blackmail in the Church; the Amish, handicapped children, and what it means to be blessed; and a great round-up essay that is, like so much of Welborn’s work, inspiring. And there’s so much more there. Go!!

And I basically agree with Jonah Goldberg, but I think he’s unnecessarily slamming a “literary” mindset and the belief that life has a plot. I can (and do) believe that life has a plot, without believing that Dubya is the Plotter; I would say that paranoid fantasies of the omnipotent and omnicompetent state are attempts to recreate the religious belief in providence without the religious belief in God. (Whether you think that state is evil or good is actually irrelevant here; the fantasy at least gives life a purpose and an explanation.) And like all other attempts to do atheist Christianity, it’s a wretched failure. I’ll probably write more about the “literary” mindset and its advantages later.