Weekly Meanderings, 28 October 2019

Our Cubs come to the end of the season before the playoffs begin. A disappointing season for us so we enter the offseason with hope that we can come back next season with a better showing.

Madeleine Kearns on plastics:

We’ve been thinking about it an awful lot since then. The mass production of plastic products began during the Second World War and has skyrocketed ever after. At this point, the industry is predicted to double in the next 20 years. While the benefits of plastics, from keeping food fresh to your toddler happy, are too obvious to note, its downsides — that there is currently more than 5 trillion plastic pieces weighing over 250,000 tons afloat at sea — deserve proper attention, too.

The trouble is that the West’s war on plastics has, of late been missing the mark. A couple of years ago, for instance, the vice president of the European Commission attacked “single-use plastics” — the kind that take “five seconds to produce, are used for five minutes, then take 500 years to break down again.” The problem he described has, in many ways, been replaced by similar problems.

Like paper. Did you know, for instance, that the life cycle of pulp and paper is the third largest cause of air, water, and land pollution in the United States, releasing over 100 million kilograms of toxins per annum? Or that around 10 percent more energy is required to create a paper bag than a plastic one, and around 4 percent more water? Paper is also made of trees, as you well know — which play a crucial role in absorbing carbon dioxide.

Despite this, Seattle banned plastic straws in July 2018, as have many corporate greens. Starbucks is phasing out plastic straws by 2020. MacDonald’s is moving to ban them in the U.K. and Ireland. Alaska Airlines is also ditching them. Will this change the weather and restore the climate to harmony? Not if the ban on single-use plastic bags are anything to go by.

When California banned single-use plastic bags in 2016, the state saw a reduction of 40 million pounds of plastic per year. However, a social scientist who researched that in 2019 found that it had inadvertently eliminated in-house recycling (i.e., using a plastic bag a second or third time for another purpose). That, in turn, resulted in the increase of trash bags by 12 million pounds. The study’s author added that to overlook this fact was to “overstate the regulation’s welfare gains.”

Similarly, after the Scottish government brought in a plastic-bag tax, it conducted a two-year investigation, published in 2005, comparing the life cycles of a single plastic bag with that of a paper bag. The conclusion was that a “paper bag has a more adverse impact than a plastic bag for most of the environmental issues considered.” A better response, evidently, would have been to try to encourage consumers to use plastic bags multiple times. In 2002, Ireland managed to do precisely that, reducing plastic-bag use per person per year from 328 to 21.

Emily McGowin’s take on women’s ordination is classical: what is assumed by Christ is healed, what is healed can be sacramental.

Many arguments are proffered against women’s ordination, some biblical, some theological, some historical, some even biological and psychological. Of course, there is far more to the arguments for and against women’s ordination than this short piece is able to address.

For now, due to space constraints, I choose to focus on one argument against women’s ordination that I find particularly theologically problematic: The assertion that women cannot represent Christ in the celebration of the Eucharist; the claim that women cannot act in persona Christi (“in the person of Christ”).

The argument, in short, goes something like this: Because women have female bodies and Jesus Christ has a male body, women cannot serve as a sacramental sign of Christ in the Eucharist.

To be more specific, women cannot act in persona Christi because their female bodies do not correspond to the body of the male Christ. In this view, female priests are not just not allowed; female priests are false signifiers. In their female persons, female priests lie, as it were, about the male person of Jesus Christ, who is presiding sacramentally at the altar.

And, as a result, women must not represent Christ at the Eucharistic feast.

Today, very often, though not always, this perspective is linked to a form gender essentialism gleaned from Pope John Paul II’s “theology of the body” and his recent popularizer, Christopher West.

In the theology of the body, male and female are seen as ontologically distinct, two parts of the one whole of the imago Dei. This “natural” gender division then serves as the foundation for structured gender roles.

When it comes to the function of the priesthood, then, the male sacramentally represents Christ while the female sacramentally represents the Church. Within this perspective, to have a woman priest is to usurp and upend a fundamental ontological reality of the world God has made.

But this brings us back to our christological and soteriological principle: “what is not assumed is not healed”. If women qua women are fundamentally incapable—and, according to some Christians, even ontologically incapable—of representing the male Jesus Christ in their female persons, then that calls into question whether their female persons can be redeemed by the male Jesus Christ.

But, of course, we know that isn’t the case.

All human beings—Jew and Greek, male and female, slave and free—are saved through the Incarnation of the Word (the life, death, resurrection and ascension of Jesus Christ).

The particularities of Jesus’ person—a poor, Jewish, male, unmarried, 30-something adult living in first-century, Roman-occupied Israel—are the means by which all human persons are redeemed. And, by becoming one with Christ in our baptism, all become partakers of his Royal Priesthood.

If that’s the case, then all persons are potentially capable of serving as sacramental signs of their Savior.

Good for Satchel:

(CNN)When Satchel Smith’s father dropped him off for his shift at Homewood Suites in Beaumont, Texas, he expected the day to be like any other: He’d start at 3 p.m. and leave around 11 p.m. that night.

That was until Tropical Storm-turned-Depression Imelda unleashed torrential flooding that trapped him and 90 other guests inside the hotel.

For 32 hours, beginning Wednesday afternoon, the 21-year-old was the hotel’s only employee. But to the guests who relied on him for nearly two days, he’s a hero.

Angela Chandler, a hotel guest, praised Smith’s composure in a post on Facebook, where it’s been shared more than 13,000 times. While flooded roads kept his co-workers from getting to work, she wrote, Smith served guests alone.

For my fellow Twainiacs:

HANNIBAL (WGEM) — A signature of Samuel Clemens has been discovered in unlit passageway in the Mark Twain Cave, officials say.

Cave officials made the announcement on Tuesday and confirmed the signature has been verified for authenticity by scholars.

“We have been looking for a Clemens signature for decades,” said Linda Coleberd, whose family has owned the cave since 1923, “but with three miles of passageways, that means there are six miles of walls to examine. And with 250,000 signatures on the walls, looking for ‘Clemens’ has been like the proverbial needle in the haystack.” Prior to 1979, visitors to the cave frequently added their names using candle smoke, pencil, paint, or berry juice. Upon becoming a National Historic Landmark, signing the cave was no longer allowed.

Officials state that the Clemens signature was discovered during a special tour in July, but Coleberd wanted to wait on announcing the news until scholars had the opportunity to compare the found signature to Sam Clemens’s boyhood signature and those of his siblings.

Unfortunately, only “Clemens” was scrawled on the cave wall in pencil, although higher resolution photos revealed the name “Sam” had first been carved in the location.

The discovery occurred during the third quadrennial Clemens Conference, a scholarly symposium held by the Mark Twain Boyhood Home & Museum.

Scholars toured the cave on July 26th. Coleberd joined the last group with plans to veer off the tour with her friend and fellow signature-seeker, Cindy Lovell, who spotted the signature.

Thomas Cook, travel business, collapses…

LONDON (Reuters) – Thomas Cook (TCG.L), the world’s oldest travel firm, collapsed on Monday, stranding hundreds of thousands of holidaymakers around the globe and sparking the largest peacetime repatriation effort in British history.

The firm ran hotels, resorts and airlines for 19 million travelers a year in 16 countries, generating revenue in 2018 of 9.6 billion pounds ($12 billion). It currently has 600,000 people abroad, including more than 150,000 British citizens.

Thomas Cook employs 21,000 people and is the world’s oldest travel company, founded in 1841. The company has 1.7 billion pounds ($2.1 billion) of debt.

WHAT HAPPENS TO TOURISTS?

The British government has asked the UK Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) to launch a repatriation program over the next two weeks, from Monday to Oct. 6, to bring Thomas Cook customers back to the UK.

“Due to the significant scale of the situation, some disruption is inevitable, but the Civil Aviation Authority will endeavor to get people home as close as possible to their planned dates,” it said.

A fleet of aircraft will be used to repatriate British citizens. In a small number of destinations, alternative commercial flights will be used.

About 50,000 tourists are stranded in Greece, mainly on islands, a Greek tourism ministry official told Reuters on Monday.