A Bad Year for DC

January 1, 2008 By Morning's Minion

After numerous years of decline, the murder rate in DC jumped by 7 percent in 2007. In total, 181 people lost their lives, and 77 percent of these victims were killed by guns. Guns. Any solution to this underlying problem of pervasive violence is undoubtedly complex, and must stand at the intersection of economic deprivation, a school system that does not care, the breakdown in family structures, a depraved popular culture, and lingering racism. But still, it always comes back to guns. Had those guns not been available, it is highly likely those people would be alive today. Most of the deaths arose from passion, arising from primal conflicts over women, respect, turf etc. They occurred in the heat of the moment. For sure, a determined killer will find ways to complete his sordid business, but the presence of guns makes it so much easier. Makes it too easy, especially in the context of a popular culture that glorifies gun violence, numbing children to the effects of vicious gun death at an early age. It is worth noting that this massacre of the innocent is taking place while the pro-gun crowd is attempting to overturn DC’s gun ban in the Supreme Court. I have read these legal arguments pertaining to the second amendment back and forth, and I find them utterly irrelevant. There is no “natural” right to own a gun any more then there is a “right” to kill your unborn child. The public authorities, those who must have concern for the common good, have the right to regulate gun ownership in the name of the common good, not only in DC but across the nation. How much more blood must be spilled before people stop trumpeting a “right” that is no such thing?

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Top 10 Iraq Myths of 2007

December 27, 2007 By Morning's Minion

From Juan Cole:

10. Myth: The US public no longer sees Iraq as a central issue in the 2008 presidential campaign.

9. Myth: There have been steps toward religious and political reconciliation in Iraq in 2007.

8. Myth: The US troop surge stopped the civil war that had been raging between Sunni Arabs and Shiites in the Iraqi capital of Baghdad.

7. Myth: Iran was supplying explosively formed projectiles (a deadly form of roadside bomb) to Salafi Jihadi (radical Sunni) guerrilla groups in Iraq.

6. Myth: The US overthrow of the Baath regime and military occupation of Iraq has helped liberate Iraqi women.

5. Myth: Some progress has been made by the Iraqi government in meeting the “benchmarks” worked out with the Bush administration.

4. Myth: The Sunni Arab “Awakening Councils,” who are on the US payroll, are reconciling with the Shiite government of PM Nuri al-Maliki even as they take on al-Qaeda remnants.

3. Myth: The Iraqi north is relatively quiet and a site of economic growth.

2. Myth: Iraq has been “calm” in fall of 2007 and the Iraqi public, despite some grumbling, is not eager for the US to depart.

1. Myth: The reduction in violence in Iraq is mostly because of the escalation in the number of US troops, or “surge.”

For the facts, head on over to Cole.

Patriarch Michel Sabbah’s Homily

December 26, 2007 By Henry Karlson

While people are rightfully interested in what Pope Benedict has to say to us during this Christmas season, we must not forget that other important church leaders have also provided compelling Christmas messages. One such homily comes from the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, Michel Sabbah. His Christmas message can be found, in full, on Zenit. It is a rather moving piece, at once reminding us the kind of difficulties Christians face in the Holy Land, while at the same time telling us that peace can still be achieved in the Middle East. The hope for peace must never be lost!

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Urbi et Orbi

December 25, 2007 By Policraticus

Full text of Pope Benedict XVI’s 2007 Urbi et Orbi message:

“A holy day has dawned upon us.
Come you nations and adore the Lord.
Today a great light has come upon the earth.”
(Day Mass of Christmas, Gospel Acclamation)

Dear Brothers and Sisters! “A holy day has dawned upon us.” A day of great hope: today the Saviour of mankind is born. The birth of a child normally brings a light of hope to those who are waiting anxiously. When Jesus was born in the stable at Bethlehem, a “great light” appeared on earth; a great hope entered the hearts of those who awaited him: in the words of today’s Christmas liturgy, “lux magna”. Admittedly it was not “great” in the manner of this world, because the first to see it were only Mary, Joseph and some shepherds, then the Magi, the old man Simeon, the prophetess Anna: those whom God had chosen. Yet, in the shadows and silence of that holy night, a great and inextinguishable light shone forth for every man; the great hope that brings happiness entered into the world: “the Word was made flesh and we saw his glory” (Jn 1:14).

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Vox Nova At the Movies: Troy, The Director’s Cut

December 7, 2007 By Henry Karlson

Homer’s Iliad is a profound religious work; while it was written by a pagan, the issues he brought up continue to be ones which Christian theologians throughout the ages try to find answers to. According to Balthasar, “The real theme of the poet of the Iliad is the divinity caught between the prayers of men, rent apart by the tragic contradictions of the world (this division is expressed in the personal relationships of the individual gods to their protégés and their quarrels against each other) and at the same time raised above the contradiction, keeping it under control by inscrutable decree.” (Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord IV: The Realm of Metaphysics in Antiquity. Trans. Brian McNeil, Andrew Louth, John Saward, Rowan Williams and Oliver Davies. Ed. John Riches (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1989), 63). How should God react to humanity when humanity, divided against itself, selfishly seeks God’s blessings upon that division and to aid one side of humanity over and against another? Indeed, as Joy Davidman points out, all too often, not only do we seek God’s blessings to be upon us, we seek God to defend us in all our beliefs and actions, even if they oppose God’s will; we want God to defend our idols:

Our earthly loves and joys are meant to lead us to Christ, and we must certainly ask the Christ in whom we believe to preserve them for us. Yet this is very different from using Christ without believing in him — from making Christian doctrine into a propaganda weapon, a pep talk to hearten us to go out and fight for good old materialism. We must return to Christianity in order to preserve the things we value — but we cannot return to Christianity at all unless the thing we value above all else is Christ. If we are reviving religion only in order to defend our own works, from the American Constitution down to the famous American blueberry pie, we are in effect asking Christ to save our idols for us.

— Joy Davidman, Smoke On the Mountain (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1985), 36-37.

While for Homer, it was Zeus who was asked to defend and protect all the different, divided nations, because it was his decrees which mattered, his decrees which had to be followed, in the end the question is the same today as it was for Homer: how and why does God choose to benefit one group of humanity over another, especially if both sides are invoking him for their benefit? One can argue that this question remains in the background of Wolfgang Petersen’s Troy.

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Eugene McCarraher on capitalism, abortion, and the “culture of death”

December 3, 2007 By Iafrate Michael

The Other Journal, an online journal of theology and culture, recently posted an interview with one of my favorite Catholic thinkers, Eugene McCarraher. McCarraher is associate professor of humanities and history at Villanova University and a frequent contributor to Commonweal, Books and Culture, In These Times and other journals. His books include Christian Critics: Religion and the Impasse in Modern American Social Thought and the forthcoming The Enchantments of Mammon: Corporate Capitalism and the American Moral Imagination. An excerpt:

First, I think that Christians should stop yakking about “consumerism.” “Consumerism” is not the problem—capitalism is. Consumerism is the work ethic of consumption, the transformation of leisure and pleasure into duties. Talking about consumerism is a way of not talking about capitalism, and I’ve come to think that that’s the reason why so many people, including Christians, whine about it so much. It’s just too easy a target. There’s a long history behind this, but the creation of consumer culture is very much about compensating workers for loss of control and creativity at work, and those things were stolen because capital needed to subject workers to industrial discipline. (I don’t, by the way, believe that we inhabit a “post-industrial” society. Our current regimes of work are, indeed, super-industrial.) Telling people that they’re materialistic is both tiresome and wrong-headed: tiresome, because it clearly doesn’t work, and wrong-headed, because it gives people the impression that matter and spirit are antithetical. As Christians, we should be reminding everyone that material reality is sacramental, and that therefore material production, exchange, and consumption can be ways of mediating the divine.

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Quote of the Week

December 3, 2007 By Henry Karlson

Do we just have to put up with this? Is there an inevitable choice to be made between dogmatic rigorism and a humane, kindly relativism? I think that in the theories we have just been talking about, there are three things people have not thought through carefully enough. First of all, religions (and nowadays, also agnosticism and atheism) are seen as being all of the same kind. But that is by no means the case. There are in fact sick and degenerate forms of religion, which do not edify people but alienate them: the Marxist criticism of religions was not entirely based on delusions. And even religions whose moral values we must recognize, and which are on their way toward the truth, may become diseased here and there. In Hinduism (which is actually a collective name for a whole multitude of religions) there are some marvelous elements – but there are also negative aspects: involvement with the case system, suttee [self immolation] for widows, which developed from beginnings that were merely symbolic; offshoots of the cult of the goddess Sakti – all these might be mentioned, to give just a little idea. Yet even Islam, with all the greatness it represents, is always in danger of losing balance, letting violence have a place and letting religion slide away into mere outward observance and ritualism. And there are of course, as we all know but too well, diseased forms of Christianity – such as when the crusaders, on capturing the holy city of Jerusalem, where Christ died for all men, for their part indulged in a bloodbath of Moslems and Jews. What that means is that religion demands the making of distinctions, distinctions between different forms of religion and distinctions within a religion itself, so as to find the way to its higher points. But treating all content as comparably valid and with the idea that all religions are different and yet actually the same, you get nowhere. Relativism is dangerous in quite particular ways: for the shape of human existence at an individual level and in society. The renunciation of truth does not heal man. How much evil has been done in the name of good opinions and good intentions is something no one can overlook.

—Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, Truth and Tolerance: Christian Beliefs and World Religions. Trans. Henry Taylor (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2004), 203-4.

Vox Nova At The Library: Pirate Freedom

November 22, 2007 By Henry Karlson

Note: While Vox Nova is meant to show Catholic commentaries on Culture, Society and Politics, for the most part the blog represents a Catholic dialogue with contemporary American society and its political concerns. However, there is room for more; my own Vox Nova at the Movies is an attempt to engage the culture at large; now I am beginning another series (and one which I hope others will also join in with me): Vox Nova at the Library. My posts in this series will be less frequent than my (almost) once a week Vox Nova at the Movies, and they will discuss books past and present. You might or might not agree with my choices or my reactions to the books themselves; but, more than movies, the books I read (fiction and non-fiction) have had a major influence on the way I think and I think it will help anyone interested in my views to read some of the many works which have influenced and continue to influence them.

For this inaugural post, I have decided to choose the recently published Pirate Freedom by Gene Wolfe (New York: TOR, 2007).

Gene Wolfe is one of the best, if not the best, science fiction authors still writing books. He is also one of the most difficult, if not the most difficult, writers to read: his works contain mysteries and riddles which the reader is intended to solve (if not in the first read, in the second or further reading of the text). Most of his novels are written in the first person with narrators who contain one or many flaws, flaws which require us to question what it is we have been told, and even consider what it is that we have not been told as a way to understand and grasp the true story. Finally, the narrators themselves tend to be people of questionable character; we get a glimpse of the way they think, and why they think what they think, but the things they do can be quite unsettling to the reader (rape, murder, and even cannibalism are common events in a Gene Wolfe story). Yet there is a point to all of it, and so however revolted the reader might be about the unfolding events in a Gene Wolfe story, they tell us something about the character, and even more, something about humanity itself (and not always, as one might imagine, all bad). Indeed, a Gene Wolfe novel is a profoundly religious work, and his Catholicism is quite apparent throughout.

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British Bishops ban church-based Amnesty International groups

November 19, 2007 By Policraticus

From the Telegraph:

Thousands of Roman Catholic schools and churches have been banned from membership of Amnesty International because of its new policy on abortion.

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What Ways Are There For Us To Get Out Of These Vicious Circles?

November 16, 2007 By Henry Karlson

A state needs a police force with sufficient power and might to protect the interests of the state. The primary interest of the state should be the common good, and this means that the people of the state are to be protected from harm. Yet the way to protect the people from harm seems to be through the threat of violence before harm is done, and the use of violence once it has been done. If this is the case, then we already suggest that it can be morally acceptable to engage in and practice harm upon others, and if this is the case, then why should the state protect people from harm?

If the police force is used to protect the people from each other, what is to protect the people from the police force if the police force is out of control? Normally it is said that this responsibility lies with some political authority, such as the mayor of the city. Yet then who is to watch this political authority and make sure they are not out of control – is it not the people? But then, if the police are meant to watch over the people, with political authorities are the ones who are to watch over the police, and the people of the state are the ones who are to watch over the political authorities, what is one to do if this system of checks and balances gets unhinged? Who is it that really has the authority and ability to fix the situation?